installing binary archives as non-root user

[db]

On 12 Jan 2018, at 14:43, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>> I installed macports as non-root and built coreutils and noticed that it does as root.
> What do you mean? What specifically did you notice?

Non-root macports installed coreutils setting root:wheel for all files of the port. I remember configure phase said something like user 'test' doesn't exist, so it'll install as root, and it did so. I subsequently tried to reproduce this from scratch, i.e., reinstalling macports as non-root and then coreutils, but I couldn't. This time it installed as the non-root user 'test'.
I've found the error in a search, albeit relating to mock and apache, but without clues as to why this showed without being reproducible in my case.

warning: user test does not exist - using root