What about this scenario - just as an item to discuss. We make certain packages available to install by non root users.
There is no reason for regular customer to install things like SUNcsr or something of this nature, From the other hand why nonadmin can not install compiler into Solaris? , So this way we have natural separation between root and non root packages. We may just do smart privilege check based on package metadata. Pkgadd and patchadd instead of simple reject any non root user, may just check does they allowed to install this particular package and this is not really new for Unix, same thing we doing for files etc... This way we did not dramatically change the concept of packaging - just let non root users install their non root packages, like compilers, etc. Of course we fase then multy instancing problem right away. When different user may like to have different version of same compiler or other tool installed but this is different problem on my opinion and we should deal with it separately for root and for non root packages both. pkginfo file may just have record - NON_ROOT_ALLOWED or something. We probably should also do all nessesary checks to avoid damaging system this way - DOS attacks etc, but so far I did not see too much danger. vassun This message posted from opensolaris.org
