I can't make world without the "games" group?

Redd Vinylene reddvinylene at gmail.com
Tue Aug 26 15:52:14 UTC 2008


> Ok, this may be a bug in the makefiles then.  My apologies if you have
> already written all that.  I caught the email thread some time after it
> started, and I replied while being offline on a trip.

Welcome back, I hope you had a pleasant journey!

>  * Which branch/version of the source tree are you building?

I was going from 7.0-RELEASE to 7.0-STABLE.

>  * How did you build everything?

I put WITHOUT_GAMES="YES" in /etc/src.conf.

>  * What was the _exact_ error message you saw?

I don't remember exactly what it said. But it was just the same as
it's always been -- make world erroring out because group `games'
doesn't exist.

> I have just fired up a buildworld + buildkernel run of 8.0-CURRENT here,
> to see if I can reproduce this.  The build runs with:
>
>    # export WITHOUT_GAMES=yes
>    # mv /usr/games /usr/games.old
>    # rm -fr /usr/src/games
>
> AFAIK, this should work fine, but I will have to wait a bit for the
> build to finish and report back.  I'll post my results in a couple of
> hours, because that's roughly how long it takes for my laptop to go
> through a full build & install run.

Cool. I appreciate that!

>> I don't see why the FreeBSD team has to insist on keeping this, pardon
>> my language, bullshit. If some sorry guy actually needs this, why
>> can't he load it as a module, or install a port?
>
> Insist on keeping what?  The fortune cookies and `/usr/src/games'?

And all the other old stuff you can disable in in src.conf.

> This is one of the nice quotes of Antoine de Saint Exupery, but in our
> case perfection is also achieved when FreeBSD empowers you to choose the
> bits that _you_ want to keep.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're saying here, but it's
certainly not related to what Mr. Exupery was saying. You can't sell
someone a new car full of obsolete parts, saying "now you have the
freedom to choose what parts _you_ want to keep", that's just
ridiculous. Next thing you know the person will die in a car crash.

Let me give you another quote. I trust you'll be able to track down
the author for this one as well:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that
a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no
unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his
sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects
only in outline, but that every word tell."

I understand you're saying that people are free to pick apart excess
weight from their systems. But only a small percentage actually needs
this excess weight. So wouldn't it be better to take it out, and
instead, give the ones who need it the freedom put it back in?

> We also understand that it is often very difficult, even outright
> impossible to satisfy _everyone_ with one flavor of beer, so we try to
> give everyone a BSD flavored brew that seems to have worked nicely for a
> lot of people and all the tools to build your own custom flavor.

Alcohol is bad for your health.

>> I worry slightly as I watch FreeBSD become bigger and bigger, fearing
>> that some day it'll all come tumbling down!
>
> Well, there's a very good way to avoid this.  You can *help* us keep BSD
> in shape.  Reports about bugs, problems and issues like the one you are
> reporting in this thread are an _excellent_ way to do that.
>
> If nobody reports a bug, then it won't get solved...  By reporting it
> and helping us track it down, find the fix and commit it to the source
> tree you are doing everyone (including the FreeBSD Project and yourself)
> a great service :-)

I appreciate the invitation. I hope I'll be able to devote large parts
of my life to the improvement of FreeBSD.

>
> Cheers,
> Giorgos
>
>



-- 
http://www.home.no/reddvinylene


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list