I guess another way to look at this is that there are different reasons for
a "shared" install:

1) You really want multiple users for an application
2) You want to prevent an ordinary user from messing with their install.

Having said that, I'm not sure we can automatically say that Windows is
always case (2) and Linux is always case (1). There are certainly examples
of Windows installs that really have multiple users that could reasonably
want different sets of plugins installed (imagine a computer lab at a
university or a shared computer at a library, etc). Conversely, there are a
large number of Linux installs that are single user desktops, but access
control is used to avoid accidentally breaking the system. So, in the end I
don't see how we can have two different flavours of shared installs and
automatically determine which one to use.

My interpretation of the intent of UAC is that it tries to behave more like
Unix access control, but for backwards compatibility reasons it is dumbed
down so we see differences in behaviour (only locking certain directories,
and performing virtualization on write).

John



On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 3:26 AM, Gunnar Wagenknecht
<gun...@wagenknecht.org>wrote:

> Hi Ian,
>
> Am 12.08.2010 15:32, schrieb Ian Bull:
> > 1. The definition of 'shared' installs.  If each user could update the
> > base then this is not really 'shared' anymore.  Some users have SR1,
> > some have SR2, etc...
>
> I started thinking more about this and I'm tending to say that Windows
> is *not* a shared install in terms of the original definition on
> Unix/Linux. I think there are different kinds of "shared" installs now.
>
> A) not really shared
>
> A user installs something into a protected area. During installation the
> user gained higher privileges (either automatically or on purpose). But
> generally the user is the owner of the system and is the exclusive user
> of the install.
>
> In essence only the installation location is write protected. A user may
> not even be aware of this (UAC).
>
> B) really shared
>
> An administrator installs something into a shared location to be used by
> multiple users.
>
>
> Case B clearly is a shared install. However, case A is different. That's
> the Windows 7 case (IMHO). I think it's wrong to treat it the same as
> case B.
>
> > 2. Consistency.  If a users updates some bundles in the shared area, and
> > then the admin updates the base, what should we use now?
>
> This clearly applies to B but not to A. In case A user == admin,
> however, the user might not even be aware of this.
>
> I think p2 needs different strategies for case A and B and a smart
> decision when selecting a strategy.
>
> -Gunnar
>
>
> --
> Gunnar Wagenknecht
> gun...@wagenknecht.org
> http://wagenknecht.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2-dev mailing list
> p2-dev@eclipse.org
> https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/p2-dev
>
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