Subject: Re: Packages and mtree
To: D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net>
From: Brad Salai <bsalai@servtech.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/28/1997 15:04:59
If someone is going to look at packages, a couple of thoughts

1. You need to have bmake in addition to pkg-src for the package system to
work.
The regular distribution seems to be missing a couple of *.*.*.mk files.
I didn't see any mention of this, and it took a while for me to figure out
what was missing. This could be because I started from 1.2.1, but I have
installed very recent -current tarballs.

2. If you sup bmake, the default place for it is different from its place
in the regular distribution, and a symlink has to be created for the pkg
stuff to find it. Again, no problem, but if pkg is supposed to be easy, it
isn't, quite.

Brad



At 10:00 AM -0500 10/28/97, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
>I have been playing with the packages stuff and I find that I need to be
>root in order to install anything from it.  It seems that mtree wants to
>be run as root.  This is kind of annoying.  I set up special users to
>install software and give them ownership of the local tree.  It sure
>would be nice if they were able to install most software without having
>to be root.
>
>I realize that there are going to be situations where root will be needed
>because some packages need to be installed setuid but most don't and I
>can check the few that do but when all of them need root you simply
>can't stop and check each and every one.
>
>So the questions are, why does mtree need to be run as root, do the
>packages really need mtree and are there any other reasons that root
>is required to install packages?
>
>
>--
>D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@{druid|vex}.net>   |  Democracy is three wolves
>http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
>+1 416 424 2871     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.


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