From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Apr 23 13:57:49 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3ECDA37B430 for ; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 13:57:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from mwm@localhost) by guru.mired.org (8.11.1/8.11.2) id g3ME3Ne16011 for FreeBSD-stable@freebsd.org; Mon, 22 Apr 2002 09:03:23 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from mwm-dated-1019916203.2a5fc3@mired.org) X-Authentication-Warning: guru.mired.org: mwm set sender to mwm-dated-1019916203.2a5fc3@mired.org using -f MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15556.6182.473948.341821@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 09:03:18 -0500 To: Fictif Cc: FreeBSD ML Subject: Re: Ports dealing with non-root users suggestion In-Reply-To: <20020422124051.A79219@mysticjah.org> References: <20020422124051.A79219@mysticjah.org> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: Mike Meyer X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.51 (Python 2.2 on FreeBSD/i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In <20020422124051.A79219@mysticjah.org>, Fictif typed: > The idea is to allow normal users to use the ports dir to install apps. > I think it's an interesting idea to allow users to keep a clean home dir > and this would allow the Admin to know what apps users are using... Then > a script could link the existing apps existing on different users > account toward a same location (btw,just in case the app was not > installed by the Admin). > > Here is the idea which implies many features and requirements (like > a dir for 'users ports' -needed for various libs, shared docs or > logs files- which doesn't depend on the usual dirs). I don't see > bigs troubles implied by this way of installing apps but you > propably do (That's why I'm posting). Ok, to answer the implied question, the problem here is that you can't blindly install new ports. Doing that is liable to break old ports. For instance, if someone installs enscript-letter, that will be hosed if someone later installs enscript-a4 or enscript-letterdj. Ditto for various things like pth and pth-devel. You can solve this, since you're apparently going to be working on the ports software anyway. You need to add a check to verify that no software is going to overwrite other software, and provide way to override that for root. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message