Build system changes

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Many thanks to tackle that work!
> For the 2.6 release branch, maybe we could just take Richard's work on #206.

Yes, agreed.

Probably also worth thinking about whether we want to release 2.7 first
with ovsqlite and *then* merge a potentially disruptive build system
change that's likely to expose a bunch of edge cases and random things the
current build system does that I didn't think about.

>> 7. The easy way to implement the special ownership and permission rules
>>     for some INN files is to install them with regular permissions and then
>>     fix the permissions afterwards with install-exec-hook.  That does mean
>>     there will be a window where the permissions will be wrong.  Does that
>>     seem okay?

> If that's the usual way to do it, that seems OK.

There unfortunately isn't a usual way to do this with Automake that I know
of.  INN is somewhat unusual that it messes with the permissions on its
executables to try to prevent them from being accidentally run by someone
other than the news user.  (I should go look at some setuid programs and
see how they do it.  sudo looks like it doesn't use Automake.  util-linux
appears to use install-exec-hook for su.)

> Do you use Automake 1.16.3 or later?
> Support for the -S .OLD option has been added to install-sh in Automake
> 1.16.3 (released in November 2020).

Oh, yes (and thank you for doing that work!).  What I wasn't sure how to
do was to pass the option to install when using Automake.  Maybe it's just
a matter of overriding INSTALL_DATA and INSTALL_EXEC.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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