prebuild sanity checks

[Alexander Leidinger]

Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net> wrote:

> This started me wondering if we shouldn't have a few sanity checks in
> the build process so we refuse to build if the environment is missing
> some really critical things.  Obviously, we can't test everything since
> it would take too long even if we had appropriate tests, but a few
> checks might save some hair pulling.  For this particular case, I can
> think of two major ways to do it.  First, we could just require that
> /dev/null exist to do anything.  That's probably a bit intrusive though.

I don't think so. A lot of software depends upon it, e.g. configure scripts
and even parts of our ports collection. Some parts may not produce unexpeted
results if it isn't available, even when it it used, but not having /dev/null
is a hack in this case and we shouldn't approve this misuse of the software.
So I think this isn't intrusive at all.

> Another option might be a new variable (or variables) that ports that
> tend to break spectacularly and unobviously can set like:
>
> BUILD_DEVS=	null zero
>
> Does this seem like a reasonable thing to do?

If you realy only talk about /dev/*: I object to make it a part of individual
makefiles. Either we depend on the common devs globally, or not at all.
Everything else is a maintainance nightmare (99% of the maintainers do/will
not test in such a restricted environment).

Bye,
Alexander.

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