Howdy LQ slackware-aarch64-current enthusiasts:

I compiled by hand libreoffice-7.5.0.3 on pinebook-pro running slackware-aarch64-current, and though successful, during this build process, several questions piqued my curiosity:

1) Slackbuilds are generally executed by root or by a user with root priviledges, but in the case of libreoffice, a warning is output that says compiling libreoffice as a root user is a bad idea, which is why I elected to manually build the package. Is it safe to ignore this warning? IMHO, since slackbuilds are executed as root, if it was not safe to build as root, it would be easy enough for the build to create a user, su to the user, build, and then go back to root, and make the package, and finish by deleting the user... are there slackbuilds that do this, or would that be unnecessary?

The details of the build are just a side note for the curious: I made sure ant was installed, and zulu-openjdk11. I used standard slackware configuration options for prefix, sysconfdir, localstatedir, libdir, etc., and I had to disable junit. It was still going six hours later when I went to bed, but was finished when I awoke. I then used the DESTDIR option to make to install it to a directory in /tmp instead of to my root directory, so I can use makepkg. This led me to the second question.

2) In the destination directory, which would be the root directory on the system that has the slackware package I am building installed on it, in addition to the standard /usr directory that I was expecting, libreoffice populated the root directory with many files that begin with "gid_Module_" such as:

gid_module_Brand_Prg_Base
gid_module_Brand_Prg_Calc
gid_module_Brand_Prg_Draw
gid_module_Brand_Prg_Impress
gid_module_Brand_Prg_Math
gid_module_Brand_Prg_Wrt
gid_module_Langpack_Basis_en_US
gid_Module_Langpack_Brand_en_US
gid_Module_Libreofficekit ...

and so on with 32 files that all start with gid_Module...


Why would they place these in a root directory, instead of something inside their tree with a sensible name like modules? I don't really want to wait another 12 hours. Perhaps I missed something in configure that was supposed to specify where to place all these gid_Module files? Are they necessary? They seem to contain a directory specification and the same path twice:

It did not create binaries in /usr/bin, but instead in /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program, so I have to either add that to my path, or create some symlinks to the respective binaries and put them in /usr/bin, which I can do in the destdir and rerun makepkg... When I launch the executable everything works. I am mainly wondering about all those gid_Module files.

All advice and criticism appreciated.

can compare with built aarch64 package

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi again. Thank you. This tells me that these gid_Module_files are superfluous because find cannot find them in your package, after exploding it:
returns empty.

Therefore, I think I'm safe to remove these gid_Modules.

I downloaded the package, (from xap), but in source/xap I didn't find source for libreoffice to look at SlackBuild, to see if regular user is used, or if entire package built as root.

The general trend in many linux distros is to avoid root altogether, using sudo only. However, we slackers are captains of our ships, so we are already used to ignoring these cautions about logging in as root.

But libreoffice specifically warned against compiling as root, so I was not sure if this was just the regular trend against using root, that I could safely ignore, or whether it was actually dangerous from security standpoint, giving something in the build root ownerships instead of user's?

Hi again. Thank you. This tells me that these gid_Module_files are superfluous because find cannot find them in your package, after exploding it:
returns empty.

Therefore, I think I'm safe to remove these gid_Modules.

I downloaded the package, (from xap), but in source/xap I didn't find source for libreoffice to look at SlackBuild, to see if regular user is used, or if entire package built as root.

The general trend in many linux distros is to avoid root altogether, using sudo only. However, we slackers are captains of our ships, so we are already used to ignoring the cautions about logging in as root.

But libreoffice specifically warned against compiling as root, so I was not sure if this was just the regular trend against using root, that I could safely ignore, or whether it was actually dangerous from security standpoint?

update 7.5.1.2 source

1 members found this post helpful.