[Haifux] Announcing a new project - fakeroot-ng

[Shachar Shemesh]

Alon Altman wrote:


> One thing I don't understand is why the complex set of scripts to save 
> state? Can't you just use one instance of fakeroot to run the entire 
> build script under? And even if you do need to save state, that's what 
> the -s and -i options are for.
It's what they are for, but that does not mean that they get the job done.

fakeroot is a fairly thin wrapper around two distinct entities. The 
first is the faked daemon, which keeps track of the state. The second is 
the LD_PRELOAD library.

The problem is that, the two being distinct, the daemon doesn't really 
know when the last process using it has exit. If you use "-s" it will 
save the state on exit, but this "exit" point is not quite well defined 
enough. On the other hand, you can set up your environment to connect to 
a running daemon, but fakeroot the script has no mechanism to actually 
do that. In essence, I wrote a wrapper that makes this relationship more 
formal. This is, of course, nothing to do with fakeroot-ng (except for 
the fact that this wrapper was still not good enough for me that I would 
find writing fakeroot-ng unnecessary).

I'll just add that all of the above is true for about two and a half 
years ago. Things may have improved since.
>
>   Alon

Shachar