Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
Then the admin is to blame. Set up disk quotas.
And disk quotas would prevent a user from installing something like OO.o or most linux games.. or their own implementation of KDE.. defeating the purpose of this RFC.
Isn't the whole idea that the admin has got nothing to do with all that. It's the users' home directories, and the idea is exactly that users can install software without bothering the admin.So the only thing the admin will have to care about is changing libraries the software installed in ~/... uses. But this is already the case, sophisticated users already have local stuff installed.
The idea (as I understand it) is not so much to circumvent the Admin, as it is to make life easier for the vanilla user. Making life easier for the user doesn't necessarily have to be done in a way that makes monitoring software installs difficult for the admin. A centralized 'userland root' as suggested in this RFC would accomplish the goal that the freedesktop guys have, without scattering installs all over the filesystem, and requiring multiple or heavily modified package db's. It also reduces the likelihood of the exact same package being installed 10 times because 10 different users didn't know the other 9 had it installed. Obviously you could have the package manager refuse to install the second copy because one was already installed, but since it's installed in that user's home directory, it's completely inaccessible to the 2nd user.. so now you either get a user who can't install the program he wanted, or you get a new copy of the same thing on the system. OR you blindly allow each user to install whatever he/she wants, and just accept that multiple copies/versions will be installed. (which, as a solution, is simply too ugly to live, imho)
Maybe the better approach would be to install the package to the central 'userland root', update the installing user's menus accordingly, then add the package to a list of programs other users can add to their menus if they so choose. That way they have a choice.
The idea of 'private installs' would probably work better as a distribution add-on instead of being part of a much more broad based RFC like this. As an example.. maybe your distribution decides to give the user the ability to install the program into 'userland root' and NOT put it on the list for other people to add to their menus. (For most inexperienced desktop users (redundant?) that would be as good as not having it installed.)