Allow user install

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jun 27, 2012, at 4:59 PM, Brooks Davis wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 09:16:05AM -0700, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:18:05 -0700, Tim Kientzle writes:
>>> Better idea:  have the build write a textual description of the
>>> tar entries.  That description can then be fed to tar to build
>>> the actual tarball.
>> 
>> Yes, that's what we do - manifest files that tar and other tools use to
>> produce the install images.
>> 
>>> The description format that tar already supports is a variant
>>> mtree format borrowed from NetBSD.  Each line specifies
>>> the tar entry fields (filename, owner, permissions, etc) and
>>> the filename where the file contents are stored.
>> 
>> Yes, we've added that support to makefs - I believe it is already in
>> -current.  There's still quite a bit to do.
> 
> It's there except that makefs uses the FreeBSD mtree code which doesn't
> support the crucial absolute path support in NetBSD's mtree.

?

I wrote the code and no, it doesn't use FreeBSD mtree code and yes,
it supports absolute pathnames:

		:
        cp = strchr(pathspec, '/');   
        if (cp != NULL) {
                /* Absolute pathname */
                mtree_current = mtree_root;
 
		:

The code should be compatible with libarchive.
Maybe there's a bug?

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net