Rich McAllister wrote: > Dave Miner wrote: > >> >> And some administrators, at least, want to be able to control what >> their users can do. Some of 'em probably take away access to tar and >> cpio, when they've seriously drunk the minimization koolaid, so no >> application vendor can ever assume that the whole possible range of >> users will be able to install the software without administrative >> intervention. > > And somebody who does that would also lock down pkgadd the same way, no?
As a matter of fact, no, because customers can (theoretically) remove tar from the system (they can't in reality right now because it's in SUNWcsu and we'd generally refuse to support them for removing items from a required package). They cannot remove pkgadd and retain a supportable Solaris installation, so long as that's the medium by which we distribute patches. > I still don't see any use to adding any kind of special authorization > check to what is going to be just a regular old user space program with > no privilege awareness at all. > Why is it necessarily not using privileges? > > we can't just say we'll enable >> users to do whatever they want without considering the administrative >> point of view, > > If we were introducing new capabilities into the system, I'd agree. But > this proposal doesn't enable any user to do anything they can't do now. > To my way of thinking, you are introducing a new capability: a standard, structured software installation mechanism for non-administrative users. At a base level, it's mostly copying bits, but if that's all it was, we wouldn't need it to begin with, 'cause we've already got a few ways of doing that. Dave
