prebuild sanity checks

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 11:39:49AM +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> 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.

Should I look at working up a patch?

> >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).

OK, I'll forget about this idea.

-- Brooks

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