[plug] Recompilation fo the whole box and fluffy dice...

[Matt Kemner]

John Summerfield wrote:

> I've not tried to recompile a whole distribution, but I have tried to 
> rebuild a lot of rpms. Many are broken; I suspect Red Hat builds 
> everything as root, which I do not wish to do.

There is a package the Debian developers came up with called "fakeroot"
which LD_PRELOAD's a library that fakes certain syscalls (chown, chmod,
mknod, stat etc) to make it unneccessary to be root to build packages.

It is used heavily in the debian-alpha port, where many people have access
to chunky alpha systems through work (after hours) for compiling packages,
but don't necessarily have root access.

Perhaps you could try installing that with alien, and see if that allows
you to build those rogue RH packages as non-root.

 - Matt