Re: [FFADO-devel] [PATCH] Fix brocken sandbox build

[Jonathan W. <jw...@ju...>]

Hi Michael

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 03:47:13PM +0400, ??????? ?????? wrote:

> Sorry for the confusion. ... I'm using sandbox build for development and
> I'm building from Eclipse using SConsolidator plugin. Most of the time I
> do not need to run scons install as root. without my patch build fails
> trying install 60-ffado.rules file.

Thanks for the additional information.  What I understand from this is that
you can run "scons install" as a non-root user and everything except the
udev rule installs.  This means you must have sufficient permissions on
other system directories such as /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib.  In this case,
what is wrong with setting your udevdir to have similar permissions?

> The patch is the workaroud for this problem, actually this is copy-paste
> of the solution for dbus configuration file from support/dbus/SConscript

The situation in support/dbus/SConscript is not quite the same since there
is more being tested than just the writability of the target directory. 
Furthermore, it is possible (albeit highly unlikely) that the system may not
have dbus installed, in which case the dbus files should clearly not be
installed.  Udev, on the other hand, is essential for the correct
functioning of a modern Linux system.  The installation of the udev file is
therefore considered a necessity.

I am still not clear as to why this change is necessary.  If you do "scons
install" you are by definition trying to install into the selected
destination directory.  If those directories are protected and cannot be
written to then a failure is expected.  If other target directories have
been configured so as to be writeable then doing the same for udevdir should
be doable.  If for some reasin it is not there is always the option of
setting udevdir to point to a place which is writable, as Adrian suggested.
The latter is the "proper" fix for the case where you can't write to the
udevdir.

What if you don't have write access to includedir?  Should the build system
include a workaround for that too?  And bindir, or any of the other places
that ffado writes to during "scons install"?  In short, I don't understand
why 60-ffado.rules should be treated differently.

"scons install" means "install onto the system".  There's an implicit
understanding that root permission will be needed to do this.  For unusual
cases such as yours there's always the possibility of overriding directory
variables like udevdir.  Given this, I don't see that a workaround for
60-ffado.rules is really needed.

Don't get me wrong - I'm more than happy to apply this patch if it can be
demonstrated that it's needed.  However, since a simple override of udevdir
would appear to solve your problem I am yet to be convinced.

Regards
  jonathan