userland: buildme has unexpected side-effects!

I ran buildme on a Pi, and was surprised to see that at the end it was modifying system files (when there’s no warning about this in the README). Yikes. I had a look at the source of buildme and saw it does:

if [ $ARCH = "armv6l" ] || [ $ARCH = "armv7l" ] || [ $ARCH = "aarch64" ]; then
  ... stuff ...
  sudo make install

IMHO unconditionally running a sudo make install (which then overwrites system-installed files) from inside a build-script run as a user is a bit nasty. I think it would be better if there were separate build and install steps, or if the install was only done if a specific flag was passed to the buildme script.

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 5 years ago
Reactions: 2
Comments: 16 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

It’s been that way since day 0, so changing it now would be a bad thing. If make installed stuff automagically then I’d agree, but having a build script install stuff less so.

Update of README would be reasonable if you felt that strongly.

6by9 on Mar 25, 2019