Re: [Fink-devel] .apps in fink

[Bill Bumgarner]

On Sunday, Jan 12, 2003, at 10:12 US/Eastern, Benjamin Reed wrote:

On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 09:53 AM, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

Read the post. I didn't say that Apps installed by Fink should be in
/Applications. They should be in /sw/Applications, to further follow the Fink
guidelines. They work fine there.

Right, they work fine everywhere. What would stop a user from moving it out of /sw/Applications? In fact, I would expect users to go "I want all of my apps in one place", and move them into /Applications, first thing they do...

Because they are owned by root and the directory is not writable by the user.

If the user does that, they lose. Just like they lose if they move any other App. The user should create aliases.

The user can just as easily move anything else in the Fink tree.

Think of it this way: in a network computing environment (or any other multiuser environment), apps should be controlled/installed by the administrator. They should not be moved by the user. The user might copy the wrapper, they might create symlinks, but that's it...

Fink installed apps should be no different. Install 'em into /sw/Applications, make root owned, and be done with it.

Exactly as it would in any properly administrated network computing environment.
The Applications directory that Fink installes into would be owned by root or
otherwise non-writable by the user. That /Applications is writable by a
'normal' OS X user is a bug, IMO.

I don't think it's necessarily a bug, it's just a historical difference in the way user control is treated between mac and unix. It's not like they made it user-modifiable by accident. Application bundles are made to be movable. That's why they're built that way.

The Applications in /Applications should not be writable by the user. It is a security issue.

If a user wants to futz with the application locations, they should create an Applications directory in their home account and create aliases there.

I use this as an example: If I'm using my sister's computer or she is using mine, neither of us wants to figure out what the hell the other did to their machine.

The user account exists for a reason-- it is the USER's area for doing whatever they want. Everything outside of it is sacred for both security and consistency reasons.

I said nothing about projects that require themselves to be installed in a
particular location.

Your original post had implied that a (possibly mobile) .app bundle is the same thing as a regular command-line binary /sw/bin/python, so I assumed you meant .app bundles that somehow were not allowed to move because they depended on some specific path info.

I apologize for the confusion -- I'm on a time crunch [flight to catch] and am being a bit terse.

That was not my intention.

b.bum



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