On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 6:52 AM, Michael Homer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 23 June 2008 21:43:35 MJ Ray wrote: >> "Carlo Calica" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > This email is to kick off development of the 015 LiveCD. We've been >> > waiting for GCC 4.3.1 to ship and that has happened now. I know that >> > Jonas has built a toolchain and some packages. What else is needed to >> > fill out ChrootCompile? Lucas, could you chime in? Once >> > ChrootCompile is setup we can start building packages. >> 2. reduce the amount of sudo'ing that Compile does - if I do this in a >> cleaner way than my current local changes, will the patch be accepted? > Yes. >> There were comments in #gobolinux that people like Compile sudo'ing >> because it means you don't have to spot the Password: prompt at >> install time - but then why not run sudo Compile anyway? > sudo Compile doesn't do anything; all scripts release sudo if started with it.
I've always been uneasy with this feature. I had a lengthy and fruitful discussion with Jonas about it, and he asked me to bring up my views on the list. As he explained it to me, the motivation for the change was that sudoed apps would write files owned by superuser in SUDO_USER's home, which would cause permission problems for the user later. The sudoed apps in case are basically Scripts and Compile citizens, writing stuff such as package/recipe list caches and the like. I don't think the solution employed was ideal (as seen by the disruption it caused). I don't remember any other programs that, when run as root, attempt backing out to a "former user". I know programs that drop privileges to run as 'nobody' or as a special user, but that's different. The solution I propose would be to change those scripts so that they no longer write local state in $HOME (and use somewhere like /System/Variable instead, when run as superuser). This would avoid confusion with the $HOME variable and make things much more predictable. Like Jonas pointed out, even if the "unsudoing feature" is rolled back, many of the associated changes improve the support for Compile being run as a regular user. So, I'd say it was a valid and useful experiment, but I'd rather have "sudo Compile" behave in its former, intuitive way, and leaving the decision of whether users want to run Compile as root or not to themselves. -- Hisham _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
