On Saturday, October 11, 2003, at 11:51 PM, Kaben Nanlohy wrote:
On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Benjamin Reed wrote:
User-mode fink is useful to a very small part of the fink population,
Not so. At work I lack root on many of the *nix boxes I use, so I regularly build and install the stuff I need in ~/local. A package manager like fink would be a godsend for this purpose.
I have not yet heard anyone mention the best reason for user-mode fink: trust problems. Do you really want to be running a ton of shell scripts and makefiles as root? Not me. I'd rather compile and build .debs as a regular user and only do the final install step as root.
Sure, I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing the need to do it immediately. I agree it's safer to not do anything as root. I disagree that it's as easy as people are making it sound. If it was, we'd have it already.
When I say "user-mode fink is useful to a very small part of the fink population", what I mean is it's really only desired by people who are both sysadmins and users of fink.
It's not like fink is making you be root for the day-to-day use of fink packages, it's only for installing new software, which for 99% of fink's users, is a fairly rare occasion. I agree it's a nice-to-have, I disagree it's worth rushing into it without thinking about all the ways it affects how the fink packaging process works.
There's only so many times I can say "I don't have anything against it but now isn't the time." If you want to implement it, do it. Don't just make a patch and say "it works for me." Build a lot of packages and see what breaks. Find out *why* it breaks, and find out how to fix that. In a month, when we have a panther bindist and things have slowed a bit, come back and show the code and make your case.
2 weeks before the panther release is not the time to come to us and say "oh, by the way, I think we should make sweeping changes to the way fink builds and installs packages."
=)
-- Benjamin Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick -- http://ranger.befunk.com/ gpg: 6401 D02A A35F 55E9 D7DD 71C5 52EF A366 D3F6 65FE "Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX." -- Tom Christiansen
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