Bruce Perens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I think the situation I described could be named "cross-installation". > There are other cases than building the base where one might want to > install to a different filesystem than the one currently running. Thus > perhaps CROSS_INSTALL=1 is the flag to use. If I don't hear much objection > to that today, I'll cast it in concrete.
This strikes me as a bad approach. It implies that whomever interprets that flag must know what a "CROSS_INSTALL" is, and what special action might be required of them to support it. The situation, however, is that some particular session is doing a "cross-installation" operation which requires some special handling. It seems to me to make more sense from an information-hiding perspective to have that one particular session know what specific special actions might be necessary to support "cross-installation", and to arrange for those special actions with whomever is responsible for performing them -- interacting whth individual action-performers in terms of the actions for which that particular performer is responsible rather than in terms of whether "cross-installation" is happening. In other words, I think it'd be better to name the environment variable something like NO_STARTSTOP_DAEMON than CROSS_INSTALL.
