nVidia drivers and rawhide

[Mike A. Harris]

Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
>>Always avoid rebuilding packages as root.
> 
> 
> Why is that?

Because it is very insecure for one thing, and can silently
destroy parts of your installed OS very easily.  When building
as root, a misplaced "rm -rf" or other fairly fatal snippet
of code can really fry your entire installed OS.  There are
lots of rpm specs out there with rather serious (and likely
unintentional) flaws in them which if executed as root have
a lot of power to cause silent problems to your system.

Another problem is spec files that do not specify a buildroot,
will get installed into your real OS at %install time!  This
overwrites system installed binaries and is very very bad!

The problems that can and do occur when building rpms as root
are far more common that you might think, and while Red Hat
supplied src.rpms and some of the better public repositories
out there both have much higher quality packaging, the risks
are still there for accidental mishaps, and a lot of mishaps
go unnoticed for quite some time unless they are really
destructive.

Here is a copy of my personal rpm config files, completely
documented to assist people in setting up rpm to build from
their personal user account rather than risk system corruption
from doing it as root:

ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris/hacks/rpmbuild-nonroot-1.0.tar.gz

Be sure to read all documentation before using, and feel free
to customize to taste and share with anyone else.


Hope this helps.