Re: git: 24d5194306b5 - main - build: Emit a warning for build targets run as root

On Fri, 9 Oct 2026 at 11:22, Jessica Clarke <jrtc27@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Whilst this is surely where we eventually want to end up, as it is best
> practice to only use root when necessary, I’m not sure this is
> something we should be warning about just yet,

Yes, this is perhaps premature, and ought not be a .warning. What do
you think of leaving it as .info? It is already helping to identify
tooling and documentation that we need to update :)

> especially given the
> official updating-from-source instructions in the handbook [1] and
> equivalent in-tree UPDATING instructions have you do everything as root
> (well, they don’t say that explicitly, but there’s no mention of
> switching users, the handbook uses make kernel which has to run
> buildkernel as root like installkernel, and the buildworld is amongst
> everything else (ditto buildkernel for UPDATING)).

As of just now the handbook no longer references `make kernel`, but it
is a fair point that the examples omit mention of using sudo or
switching between an unprivileged build user and installing as root.

So far on the TODO we've got:
- documenting a suggested non-root workflow
- nanobsd
- etcupdate