Hi, On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 12:36:08PM -0600, Chad Walstrom wrote: > Before you begin the trek to customize dpkg, ask yourself the importance > for such a feature and address the difficulties. > > * Some binaries are compiled with hard-coded paths for > configuration files. > - You would need to patch these applications to accept a > commandline option to specify where to find the config file > or override this. Not necessary - you don't need the path to be run-time configurable; compile-time configurable is enough. Most applications already allow that using configure --prefix, --sysconfdir, etc. > - You could come up with an install-time configuration for > interpreted language-based programs. > > * Some applications require /proc or /dev access. Are these > appropriate for a user to install? How do you automate these type > of system policies. /Very/ simple. Based on Unix permissions. It's hard and almost always unnecessary to forbid anything that's allowed by Unix permissions; conversely, I think anything that's not forbidden by Unix file permissions should not be made unnecessarily hard. > * Some software installs with setuid/setgid permissions. How do you > override these? If you install as $USER, the files won't be setuid/setgid. The consequence is that the user can only run things as himself. This is bad why? Remember, we're not talking about users running their own mailspools or printqueues. In most cases it'll be desktop apps that don't need access to anything but /tmp/.X11-Unix and $HOME. > * Debian packages use a very simple process to set the ownership to > files at build-time. How do you override these permissions at > install-time? There's a difference beteen ownership and permissions. Ownership is simple; if a random user installs files in some place he can write to, he'll be the owner and stay the owner. Permissions can be anything. > There are a lot of issues to deal with. The flexibility you propose is > an interesting concept. Perhaps you could subscribe to the dpkg > developers' list and discuss this topic with them. I think the flexibility is relatively easy to achieve in a user friendly way if we stick to source packages. A nice side effect of making source package management more user friendly is that it will silence the people whining about Gentoo's CPU optimizations a bit. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies - Emile van Bergen emile@e-advies.nl tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 http://www.e-advies.nl
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