delete in post-destroot is ineffective, how to make it effective?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

On 2021-07-12 11:29, Rainer Müller wrote:

> On 12/07/2021 11.49, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:
>> I am breaking a single upstream codebase into subports. I want each
>> subport to contribute some of the overall complement of files. But the
>> "make install" of the codebase installs more files than I want. Thus I
>> think the right thing to do is to declare a post-destroot which delete
>> the excess files from each subport.
> Sounds reasonable, but be aware … With the same
> build command, each subport will take the same time to compile from
> source, even if you later only need a few files in destroot. Therefore
> it would still be a good idea to only build what you need for each subport.

I understand. I have modified the configure args for each subport to 
prevent what build activity I can. Unfortunately, the upstream code does 
not give me configure args to prevent building these particular items.

>> My Portfile has an entry like this:
>>
>>      post-destroot {
>>          set sharedir ${prefix}/share
>>          delete ${prefix}/lib/libfreeciv.a
>>          delete ${sharedir}/doc ${sharedir}/man ${sharedir}/locale
>>      }
> At this point, the files are still not installed on the system, but
> reside in the staging directory named ${destroot}, which is at
> work/destroot/ as you already found out below.
>
> You need to use absolute paths ${destroot}${prefix}/... here. ${prefix}
> is always an absolute path, that's why it can be combined without an
> explicit separator. For example, it should look like this:
>
>    delete ${destroot}${prefix}/lib/libfreeciv.a
>
>> But, when I run "sudo port destroot freeciv-server", then look at what I
>> believe is the destroot:
>>
>> ls $(port work freeciv-server)/destroot/opt/local/share
>>
>> the directories which I wanted to delete are still present.
>>
>> I look in the main.log for this subport. I don't see any diagnostics
>> from those delete directives.
> This was an attempt to delete files directly from the prefix, which is
> /opt/local by default. But trying to delete non-existing files will not
> result in an error. Therefore it silently passed doing nothing.

Thank you for the help.  I figured it out. It was worse than I thought. 
The delete was not just effective, it was _too_ effective! It was 
deleting parts of my live installation: /opt/local/share/doc for all 
ports, /opt/local/share/man for all man pages, etc. It's at moments like 
this that I'm glad to have good backups from which to restore the parts 
I blew away.

What I missed is that "delete" operates in the context of the entire 
filesystem, not of the destroot path. Thus, it is very important to 
include ${destroot} at the start of every path I pass to "delete".

For example,

     post-destroot {
         set sharedir ${destroot}${prefix}/share
         delete ${destroot}${prefix}/lib/libfreeciv.a
         delete ${sharedir}/doc ${sharedir}/man ${sharedir}/locale
     }

I can now delete files as needed from the destroot. I now get to 
encounter the next obstacle. :-)

Thank you for the help, Rainer! Best regards,
       —Jim DeLaHunt