[Buildbot-devel] How to compile code as root user

[Ian Zimmerman]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:42:45 -0500
"Dustin J. Mitchell" <dustin at zmanda.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 2:43 PM, Ben Hearsum <bhearsum at mozilla.com>
> wrote:
> > We've got a particular part of build system which requires root
> > access because of a tool on OS X. Our workaround was to wrap the
> > small part which requires root access in a binary that is setuid
> > root. Then the build system that can call it without runnng
> > compretely as root.
> 
> We did something similar, also on OSX.  We added the necessary
> commands to sudoers, and ran them with 'sudo', but either way works.
> 
> Incidentally, this quickly became annoying, so we switched to doing
> OSX packaging piece by piece, using a shell script, and then packaging
> it up with hdiutil.  We've been much happier ever since.
> 

I need root for my build too, since chroot is an essential element of
the build.  (We build an entire linux distro from scratch, more or
less.)  And yes, everybody hates it, but nobody has been able to come
up with anything better, mostly due to innumerable source packages
looking in places where they shouldn't for configuration values.

I am guessing this need is a bit more common than textbooks would have
it, and so we shouldn't be too hard on Raj (and me :)

i