[ofa-general] install.sh question

[DK Smith]

Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 06:50 -0700, DK Smith wrote:
>> The new installer appears to be restricted to native installations. Is
>> this the case? If so, isn't this also a problem for other people?
> 
> But IMHO, the OFED build system should be able to complete building all
> RPMs without a) needing to be root and b) having to install intermediate
> RPMs on the build system.  AFAIK, it can/does not do this currently.
> 

Hi and thanks for adding you voice to the chorus, err, I mean, duet.

I did not want to seem ungrateful by complaining, too, about the root
user thing. But seriously, how dangerous is that? ... to run some
massive perl script of unknown quality as root. My own paranoia was
beginning to make me worried. Am I too paranoid? LOL! So I appreciate
this being mentioned, explicitly. :)

Personally, I do not have good experiences with some vendor-supplied
installer programs that claim that they must be run as root. As an
example take QLogic's buggy installer for QLAxxxx FC product.

The utility of Make seems to be often overlooked and/or under-used or
simply misused. I assume that writing a custom installer is big decision
and commitment. So then why not make such a large investment able to
relocate the build output to another part of a file system? Or use the
facilites that Make provides to design such functionality? The kernel
build process seems to be a working model of such, that could be copied.
A lot of flexibility can be achieved by parameterizing the K_VER and
MODULES_INSTALL_DIR variables. Is there something specific to OFED that
makes this sort of flexibility impossible?

Cheers,
DK