Follow up sent to debian-user as it seems more appropriate. On Sun, Nov 26, 2000 at 05:46:43PM -0800, Mircea Luca wrote: > Hi everybody > I have a simple problem.:-) > How can I give access to a user to install software using apt-get > without giving him the root password.Preferable the software should be > installed in the user's home directory.Can this be done at all with a > standard Debian install ? Obviously the user should not be able under > any circumstances to do a dist-upgrade or remove other packages that he > didn't install. > Basically I think I would like to have the option to specify system > packages and user packages and keep them kinnda separate,or compiling > an apt-get binary just for the user with missing certain options. > The way things are right now are very inconvenient for a regular user. > > Thanks for any insights,ideas,pointers to specific man/info pages...
I'm no expert but have you tried apt-get source? After downloading the source in this fashion it's not too difficult to change the debian/rules file to point to somewhere other than /usr (ie $HOME/usr, /usr/local, some other world or individual writable dir) That works most times, it may be rather bothersome as it will still need root perms for dpkg -i ? Not sure on that, but dpkg database only maintains one set of data for the system. There has been some alternative talk of makeing dpkg able to install to other than standard directories via an environment variable, but it appears to be dead in the water. So you can use apt-get source and perform local build/install, but cannot interact with dpkg without root perms AFAIK. HTH Gordon Sadler
