Subject: bug#53534: 28.0.91; on netbsd 'gmake install' outputs 'find: chown: No such file or directory'

From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2022 23:26:36 -0500

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Users on NetBSD cannot invoke the 'chown' command?

Presumably it is not in the default PATH of non-root users;
eg perhaps it is /sbin/chown.

On GNU/Linux, non-root users normally cannot chown things (to other
users).

It's not obvious to me that these venerable chowns in the Makefile are
useful.

Apart from them being no-ops for non-root installs (apart from possible
group changes), LOGNAME (which is the first choice for setting
$installuser) has different values in `su` and `su -`. So the ownership
of the emacs installation will vary according to how su was invoked.

I guess they are to deal with tar defaulting to --same-owner for root.