ports/158179: some packages do not fully honor -P dir option in pkg_add(1)

[Dieter BSD]

The following reply was made to PR ports/158179; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Dieter BSD" <dieterbsd at engineer.com>
To: bug-followup at freebsd.org
Cc: FreeBSD Ports <freebsd-ports at freebsd.org>,freebsd at sopwith.solgatos.com
Subject: Re: ports/158179: some packages do not fully honor -P dir option in
 pkg_add(1)
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:39:42 +0000

 >> 1. Spell out very clearly its purpose - is it to populate a jail, for
 >> example?
 >
 > Populating a chroot/jail is one purpose.
 
 Whoops, it occurs to me that using -P to populate a chroot/jail
 would only work for simple cases.
 
 There is the -C option, but it "needs to be a fairly
 complete file system, including everything normally needed by
 pkg_add to run" which could be problematic, as you may want the
 chroot/jail to have the absolute minimum possible.
 
 So to populate a chroot/jail we'd want to be able to specify
 two directories: one for the real path, and one for the
 after-chrooting path. The -c option is available.
 
 Say a package has the binary bin/foo and the config file etc/foo.conf.
 1) Pkg_add would install /usr/local/bin/foo and /usr/local/etc/foo.conf.
 2) Pkg_add -P /bar would install /bar/bin/foo and /bar/etc/foo.conf.
 3) Pkg_add -c /chroot would install /chroot/bin/foo and /chroot/etc/foo.conf.
 4) Pkg_add -c /chroot -P /bar would install /chroot/bar/bin/foo and /chroot/bar/etc/foo.conf.
 
 In cases 2 and 4, the foo binary would have to have some way to know to
 look for foo.conf in /bar/etc rather than /usr/local/etc. Perhaps
 CONFIG_PATH ? But in the general case, we'd need a lot of *PATHs.
 Or a way to set PREFIX at install time. (But how?) Or...?