Allow user install

[Warner Losh]

On Jun 26, 2012, at 8:18 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Warner Losh <wlosh at bsdimp.com> writes:
>> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> writes:
>>> I've been thinking for a while that some bor^H^H^Henterprising soul
>>> should hack install(1) so that if a specific environment variable is
>>> set, it writes the file to a tarball instead of writing it to disk.
>>> Unfortunately, there would still be a ton of ${LN} etc. that would need
>>> to be handled somehow.  Perhaps install(1) should have an option to
>>> create symlinks so we could use that instead of ln -s, in the interest
>>> of reducing the number of different tools used during installation.
>> I'd prefer that to this hack, honestly, but this hack is cool.  NetBSD
>> did this years ago, and bringing it and the changes to xtree would be
>> a good thing.  There's also a number of mkdirs that also need to be
>> updated.  Let's not reinvent the wheel here, when there's a perfectly
>> good wheel elsewhere.
> 
> We already have install -d for mkdir, and in any case, very few
> Makefiles actually create directories.
> 
> But if the Makefiles use ${LN} instead of ln, we can easily point LN at
> a tool (perhaps even just a shell script) that does whatever is needed
> to record the symlink in the tarball instead of creating it on disk.

NetBSD's build already handles those cases with install.  It would be easy enough to bring that in.  The time consuming part will be fixing all the "short cuts" and inconsistencies in the build so that its output can be used.

Warner