I think there is room for both user-installed system-wide packages and non-system-wide packages. The RBAC profile should address users installing system-wide packages. At the other end of the spectrum are user installed packages that only that user will use. A standard layout for storage of packages in the user's home directory (or elsewhere) would help that tremendously, as applications could then have a standard place to look for user-installed packages.
An example of a user-installed package would be a netscape/firefox plugin. Some users will want the plugin, while others may not. If firefox could count on plugins being in a particular well-defined place, it would make firefox easier to use. I don't think that dotfiles (and dotfile subdirectories) work in all cases for this. Typically, firefox and other applications will install plugins into $HOME/.netscape (or similar). If a common location existed for storage of applications, another browser could look in that location without having to understand the .netscape file structure. This is what has been done (for the most part) on the Mac OSX platform. User configuration information is stored in $HOME/Library: osx [~/Library]% ls Acrobat User Data Contextual Menu Items Keychains Safari Address Book Plug-Ins Cookies Logs Saved Searches Addresses Documentation Mail Screen Savers Application Support Favorites Mozilla Sounds Assistants Folding at home NeoOfficeJ-1.1 StickiesDatabase Audio FontCollections Phones Syndication Autosave Information Fonts Plug-ins TaskSwitch Caches Icons PreferencePanes Voices Calendars Images Preferences Widgets Classic Indexes Printers iTunes ColorPickers Internet Plug-Ins QuickTime ColorSync Internet Search Sites Receipts Colors Keyboards Recent Servers Having the defined hierarchy allows the applications to look for items (such as Fonts above) in a regular manner. On May 31, 2006, at 8:57 AM, James Falkner wrote: > > > Adrian Florea wrote: >> Hello, >> I was thinking about the fact that a "normal" user can >> add/rem packages to a system not only $HOME. >> The idea mentioned here is great. >> But what about linking pkg/patch tools to a PAM >> module(s) ? Or to some special privileges ? > > The packaging tools are already part of the "Software Installation" > RBAC profile. Therefore, if a given user is assigned to that > profile, they will be able to invoke the pkg/patch tools > using elevated privileges, and can then add/remove pkgs/patches > to/from the system itself. > > -jhf- > _______________________________________________ > install-discuss mailing list > install-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/install-discuss ----- Gregory Shaw, IT Architect Phone: (303) 673-8273 Fax: (303) 673-8273 ITCTO Group, Sun Microsystems Inc. 1 StorageTek Drive MS 4382 greg.shaw at sun.com (work) Louisville, CO 80028-4382 shaw at fmsoft.com (home) "When Microsoft writes an application for Linux, I've Won." - Linus Torvalds
