Sudo in dev builds isn't very necessary

[JonChesterfield]

I don't have sudo on my dev machines but have successfully built the dev build despite that.

Process followed:

1. Install the various dependencies as root
2. mkdir /wedge && chown $USER:$USER /wedge
3. sed 's_sudo__'g build/*, roughly - hacked sudo out one at a time until success
4. Tests pass

The key change is probably dropping sudo from sudo $0 _unboxed-install "$@" in deps/wedge.sh, may also need to patch sudo $0 _install-new-r "$@" from build/py.sh.

apt install is present in a couple of places, test/spec-bin.sh build/deps.sh and there's a release-only set involving valgrind elsewhere.

I'm not sure on the cleanest way to modify the build scripts to make this optional. Perhaps allowing /wedge to be somewhere non-root-owned and then installing as a user instead?

[andychu]

Oh glad you looked into this! Yes I want to get rid of /wedge and any root requirements:

https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/308821-containers/topic/Getting.20rid.20of.20.2Fwedge

That was a bit of silly experiment where I thought we could cache /wedge, but we couldn't cache /home/ANYUSER/wedge

---

But now I realize we don't really need caching for this particular problem

I also realized that the WEDGE package defs can pretty much be written so their agnostic of /home/user/wedge vs. /wedge (in case we ever want caching for a different problem)

( FWIW this thread summarizes the 3 reasons for WEDGE - https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/308821-containers/topic/Wedge.3A.20flexible.20packages.20with.203.20options )

Glad you got it working!

[JonChesterfield]

Caches under root and not under $USER wouldn't be much of a disaster either - it's already an initial build-deps.sh step that you don't run particularly often, and it runs within the time it took to find coffee on a slow machine. I haven't looked up what wedge actually is but am glad the build didn't lead with installing docker.