[Slackbuilds-users] Moving sbopkg to /usr/sbin and require root

Serban Udrea serban.udrea at skmail.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de
Wed Feb 11 10:39:15 UTC 2009


Chess Griffin wrote:
> Sorry for the cross-post to sbopkg and slackbuilds.org mailing lists but
> I want to get as much feedback as possible.
 >

Hello!

I dare to disagree with other posters. I actually do not understand why 
anything else but installing the final package needs root rights. I am 
(still) working on some packages I hope to submit soon and I do 
everything but package installation/removal as a normal user without 
problems.  Thus I would actually drop root for anything but final 
installation/removal. In my opinion it is always good to use root rights 
as sparingly as possible.

I do not know how big a problem is to change sbopkg, such that just the 
last step needs root rights, but I would say that a first change would 
be to have sbopkg default directories with access rights like /tmp.

Another possibility would be to have a sbopkg group and just users 
belonging to this group would be allowed to use sbopkg, which may be 
achieved by the default access rights to sbopkg's directories.

Another point is that all the SlackBuilds I looked at have

chown -R root:root .

which doesn't work if you are a normal user (at least on my machine).

At the moment I use

chown -R $UID:$GROUPS .

which seems to work OK but I do not know if it is acceptable, because I 
didn't submit any SlackBuild until now.

Finally, I wouldn't compare sbopkg with other tools which work just with 
ready-made packages, since those tools just need to do what is to be 
done as root.

Best regards,

Serban Udrea


More information about the SlackBuilds-users mailing list