Re: apt-get and The_User

[Chris Gray <cgray@nowonder.com>]

>>>>> "Mircea" == Mircea Luca <mluca@canada.com> writes:

    Mircea> Hi everybody I have a simple problem.:-) How can I give
    Mircea> access to a user to install software using apt-get without
    Mircea> giving him the root password.Preferable the software
    Mircea> should be installed in the user's home directory.Can this
    Mircea> be done at all with a standard Debian install ? Obviously
    Mircea> the user should not be able under any circumstances to do
    Mircea> a dist-upgrade or remove other packages that he didn't
    Mircea> install.  Basically I think I would like to have the
    Mircea> option to specify system packages and user packages and
    Mircea> keep them kinnda separate,or compiling an apt-get binary
    Mircea> just for the user with missing certain options.  The way
    Mircea> things are right now are very inconvenient for a regular
    Mircea> user.

This isn't a simple problem.  The way I usually do it is just to
compile things I want from source.  Just inform your user to do an
apt-get source packagename (is that allowed by apt-get? I always use
sudo.) and then simply compile it using 

./configure --prefix=$HOME && make install

most packages should be this easy to compile.  After the process is
done, the user can just 

rm -rf packagename*

if there is a disk quota.  

Hope this helps,
Chris