On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

: > The diff follows.  Of course, I'd like to choose a different name for the
: > symbol and put it into pkgtools/pkg_install/Makefile, rather than potting an
: > OS-specific symbol there.  Is there a preferred naming convention here?  I
: > was thinking "PKG_INSTALL_AS_NONROOT", but that sounds clunky.
:
: Um, you can run the pkg_* tools as non-root on Unix systems very well.

Not "very well".  Two problems with the existing sources (you didn't read my
diff?):

* umask is set to 022 unconditionally in pkg_add.  In a gid-based
  administration system, this must be no more than 002.

* a warning is issed in pkg_delete if getuid() != 0.  This is rather
  pointless in a gid-based administration system, and doubly so under
  Interix where even "Administrator" is not uid 0.

: So it's system dependent - if the system in question doesn't really know
: how to do things w/o system privileges (and thus probably always runs as
: Administrator or so),

That's not how it works.  On Interix, "Administrator" does have system level
privileges, but so does any user of group "+Administrators".  Typically,
system management on such systems is not done as the single centralized user
"Administrator".

What do you think I should do with the changes to address the two issues
above?

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com>