Re: Does git belong in root's $PATH?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jan 7, 2006, 18:31 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601071023250.3169@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601070838470.6317@x2.ybpnyarg>

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006, walt wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> When updated my kernel this morning, the same way I've been doing
> it for many months, I noticed that the -gxxxxxxx localversion
> string was missing from the new kernel's name.
> 
> I finally figured out that this happened because /usr/local/bin
> is not in my root's $PATH, and the setlocalversion script depends
> on git.  (The only thing I do as root is 'make install').

Ok, sounds like a build buglet to me. If you've done a "make" as a regular user, and just do a "make install" as root, I'd argue that the "make install" should do as little as humanly possible, and literally just install the kernel. If it starts changing the version, that sounds a bit fishy.

Sam, anything we can do?

That said:

> I suppose I'm asking a philosophical question here:  do you
> guys install git where root can find it (as a system tool)?

I don't, but I don't use "make install" anyway, I just do "make modules_install". I install the kernel by hand, I always have.

Of course, that's partly because I've always felt that "make install" does too much (I think "make modules_install" is better - it really only installs the already-built modules).

Maybe it would be best to remove the "vmlinux" dependency from "make install" (so that "make install" will do exactly that: just install). I think all the documentation already tells you to do a "make" and then a "make install".

The other make targets really _are_ different: "make fdimage" depends on vmlinux, but that's because it literally just builds the image. "make install" is special.

Sam, what say you? I forget what the kbuild mailing list is, but maybe you can forward this suggestion there..

		Linus