begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 12:12:30PM -0700: > Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > >The fact that I need "administrative privileges" to install software is > >a flaw from the start. > > I'm still not convinced of this one. If you install everything in your > homedir your homedir basically becomes / and your uid basically becomes > the superuser because it can write to everything that matters to you so > in that case why not just login as root in the first place?
Because you may want to install it in /tmp or $HOME/testing or /jails/appname or somesuch instead, first, to see how well it works. Or think of it as roles... why should the role used to install apps into /usr/local have permission to modify stuff in /usr, /sbin, or /etc? If M$ decides to come out with a Linux version of MSWord, maybe they'll "helpfully" replace OO.o, KWord, AbiWord, and ApplixWare installs with links to "do you want to run MSWord instead?" proxies. Sure, there will be a teeny-tiny checkbox somewhere on a crowded options page equipped with multiple scrollbars to disable this "feature"... The fact is, an application shouldn't _care_ what UID it's being run as -- it should just do the install in the directory it's been pointed at, and if it doesn't have permissions, it should log the failure and tell the user it couldn't do something. It should *not* check the UID and refuse to install unless it's run as UID 0. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
