I'm not a FreeBSD developer (committer), but I frequently send patches to the source tree (mostly man pages). I have source tree for my machine (-STABLE) under
/usr/src, and I have a separate tree for the latest source tree (-CURRENT) under
/usr/src-current. I make changes for patches in the
/usr/src-current (before making changes I fetch the latest sources via
git pull). Both
/usr/src and
/usr/src-current are owned by me (my regular user), so that I can easily edit and compile the files without permission issues. This way I also can use git without going to root.
Do you usually make changes directly in the source tree and then run make buildworld && make installworld on top of a working system?
As I said, I usually fiddle with manual pages, which does not require building the world. So, I make a change to the man page and then examine it right in place (say, we have a change to
sh(1) manual page):
man ./bin/sh/sh.1. Sometimes I also change the source code for some programs (just for myself), and in that case it's again not necessary to install the whole world - you can go into the program's directory, compile it, and then use the resulting binary executable from the
/usr/obj to test it. Like this:
Code:
# cd bin/ls
# make
# /usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/bin/ls/ls
But of course, for large kernel or program changes, you would probably need to roll out a VM.
