Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Ian Stakenvicius <axs@g.o>
To: "gentoo-dev@l.g.o" <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] CWD-relative ROOT support in portage: misfeature?
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:52:25
Message-Id: 69F54735-B17B-44A5-9FF6-B5538E374619@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] CWD-relative ROOT support in portage: misfeature? by "Gregory M. Turner"
1 On 2012-08-17, at 11:00 PM, "Gregory M. Turner" <gmt@×××××.us> wrote:
2
3 > It has come to my attention that gentoo supports "relative" ROOT, which is to say that, by design, portage will act as though (in bash terms):
4 >
5 > ROOT
6 >
7 > equals
8 >
9 > "${PWD}/${ROOT}"
10 >
11 > when (again in bash terms):
12 >
13 > [[ $ROOT != /* ]]
14 >
15 > at the moment execution crosses the boundary between a non-portage program and a portage program. For example, I ran the following from a bash-prompt with PWD=/tmp in a portage-2.2 ~amd64 environment:
16 >
17 > greg@fedora64vmw /tmp $ mkdir foo
18 > greg@fedora64vmw /tmp $ ROOT=foo portageq envvar ROOT
19 > /tmp/foo/
20 >
21 > Question: do we really want this behavior?
22 >
23 > I have reason to believe that almost nobody uses this feature (namely, gcc-config and binutils-config are both broken under it for ages and nobody filed a bug or fixed it: see bugzilla #431104).
24 >
25 > Does /anybody/ use this feature? If not, I'd suggest that the portage team might ask itself whether the benefits of continuing to maintain it are greater than the hassle and potential for error it facilitates.
26 >
27 > Just my 2c,
28 >
29 > -gmt
30
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32 Sorry for the HTML response... am on the road.
33
34 I don't use the feature but I would fully expect said behavior. ie, going with the example above I would expect that I'd need the / in front for the path to not be relative.
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41 >

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] CWD-relative ROOT support in portage: misfeature? "Gregory M. Turner" <gmt@×××××.us>