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

[Eric Hameleers]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Serban Udrea wrote:

> Marco Bonetti wrote:
>> On Wed, February 11, 2009 11:39, Serban Udrea wrote:
>>> 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.
>> (note: I'm not a slackbuilds.org core developer)
>
> Neither I.
>
>> It's wrong, since the standard is to have executables owned as root:root.
>
> Not necessarily wrong, if you run the script as root you get the right 
> ownership. Moreover "chown root:root" can be applied in the post-install 
> script to what got installed, it's not necessary to have it in the 
> SlackBuild.
>
> An alternative to what I'm doing now may be to define two variables in the 
> SlackBuild, say USR and GRP, which both default to root but may be redefined 
> when running the script.
>
>> I use sbopkg as a tool like Gentoo emerge in order to fetch, build and
>> install programs system wide and I like this way.
>
> Your choice.
>
>> If you're worried about
>> building packages as root, use a separate (virtual, maybe) machine and
>> lock it down: build packages on that machine and install them on yours.
>
> Not everybody has a spare machine or the skill and/or time of playing around 
> with virtualisation. I miss at least the machine and the time.

At slackbuilds.org we will only accept submissions that should be run as 
the root user. This is a policy decision we took when we setup the site, 
we want our SlackBuilds to behave the same as the SlackBuild scripts you 
find in Slackware itself. Yes, running a script as root has it's dangers, 
but that is exactly why we (admins) do the QA checks and add a GPG 
signature to all our published tarballs: we want to guarantee the users of 
our scripts that they are safe to run, even as root.

Please keep this in mind when you submit the scripts you are developing. 
Use the template.SlackBuild at http://slackbuilds.org/template.SlackBuild 
as an example if you are not sure of how to create a script that will be 
accepted by us.

Eric

-- 
Eric Hameleers
Email: alien at slackware.com
Jabber: alien at jabber.xs4all.nl
Gpg fingerprint: F2CE 1B92 EE1F 2C0C E97E  581E 5E56 AAAF A75C BDA0