Confusion over BSD.tests.dist

[Julio Merino]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Garrett Cooper <yaneurabeya at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2013, at 2:04 PM, Julio Merino <julio at meroh.net> wrote:
>> Is TESTSBASE supposed to be customizable?  (And before answering that:
>
> It can be:
>
> # grep -r TESTSBASE share/mk
> share/mk/bsd.README:TESTSDIR    Target directory relative to ${TESTSBASE} for tests and
> share/mk/bsd.own.mk:TESTSBASE?= /usr/tests

I know it _can_ be, but the question is: do we want to support that as
a use case?  I'm not sure why anybody would want to move /usr/tests
anywhere else.  If there is no real reason other than "just because",
I don't think the build system should make any accommodations to make
it trivial.  (Because if it's trivial, people _will_ move it and when
things break, it's one more thing to support in bug reports.)

>> are things like LIBDIR or INCLUDEDIR user-tunabale?)
>
> Those are user tunable too, but generally not tweaked, except when dealing with packages that use bsd.*.mk (e.g. ports):
>
> # egrep --include \*.mk -r '^INCLUDEDIR|^LIBDIR' share/mk
> share/mk/bsd.own.mk:LIBDIR?=    /usr/lib
> share/mk/bsd.own.mk:INCLUDEDIR?=        /usr/include

Right, so they are tunable when bsd.*.mk are abused to build things
from ports (and in that case mtree doesn't apply).  But I believe they
are not tunable to tell the base system where the libraries or headers
should be; if they were, I'm pretty sure things would break in obscure
ways and it'd be a "support" headache.

-- 
Julio Merino / @jmmv