Re: Aw: Re: Installation: Manual text
On Sat, Apr 09 2022, Laurence Finston wrote: > Most people have their own computers nowadays and I never log on as > `root' or as a user with root permissions unless I have to. None of > the software I've worked on in the last 10 years plus requires root > permissions for anything (installing or running) so I always install > it somewhere under my home directory. Oh, so you never user your distribution package manager to install software, and, instead, you compile and install all your programs? And never use 'sudo' or equivalent? That's certainly possible, but, in my experience, for most people, most of the software they use has been installed with root privileges (either directly or vicariously via sudo or an equivalent program). Of course, that doesn't mean that they use that software as root, and mdk doesn't require that either at all (nor would i recommend doing it). For regular users not wanting to compile everything they use, my first recommendation would be to simply use their package manager to install mdk (at least in debian, it's still well-maintained and there's a deb for the latest release). For expert users like you wanting to compile mdk themselves, i still recommend installing it in the same places where a package manager would (and that requires root access for installation, yes): mdk uses lots of external libraries and their resources (icons and the like), most of the time installed by package managers in similar locations. In my (necessarily limited) experience as a maintainer, there are less problems that way (specially with complicated, big dependencies, like GTK+ or Glade, which like to look for their resources in "standard" locations). Of course, your mileage may vary (documentation patches, or of any other kind for that matter, are always welcome). Thanks, jao -- Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. -Buddha (c. 566-480 BCE)
Aw: Re: Installation: Manual text
Most people have their own computers nowadays and I never log on as `root' or as a user with root permissions unless I have to. None of the software I've worked on in the last 10 years plus requires root permissions for anything (installing or running) so I always install it somewhere under my home directory. I therefore think that /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or any such directory is a poor choice for the default for `configure' because it will always fail if users don't happen to have root permissions and if they do, they might well overwrite an existing version of the software that came with the installation or they installed later with synaptic, apt-get, or whatever, or by hand, for that matter. Thanks for the reference to `autopoint'. I've used `gettext' but I don't remember using `autopoint'. Maybe I just forgot. I remember having heard of autogen.sh. I've never used it for my own software and I like to know the individual steps of how to build a package. No matter how common the "common lore" is, someone's going to not have heard of it. I first started using various commercial versions of Unix in 1991 and GNU/Linux around 2003. It's too bad, in a way, but I've never felt that I was part of a "band". > Gesendet: Samstag, 09. April 2022 um 03:01 Uhr > Von: "Jose A. Ortega Ruiz" > An: "Laurence Finston" > Cc: bug-mdk@gnu.org > Betreff: Re: Installation: Manual text > > On Tue, Apr 05 2022, Laurence Finston wrote: > > [...] > > > I haven't checked this, but apart from being able to install in, e.g., > > /usr/bin, I can't imagine there would be any need for `root' > > permissions with respect to MDK. > > The default would actually be /usr/local/bin, if i recall correctly, and > no, none of the MDK utilities need root permission to run; but by > putting them in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin we're not making them run > with root permissions, just making them easily available by default to > all users in the machine (they'll still run with the permissions of the > user invoking them). But a note in the docs won't hurt anyone, of > course (it's just again that two decades ago those things were "common > lore" to the much smaller band of gnu/linux aficionados :)). > > Cheers, > jao > -- > Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. > -Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983) >
