On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:32:18 +0100 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking for a way to enable non-root users to install packages on > their local machines, but not removing/purging them. At which point, you lose anyway because sometimes package installation *requires* removal of another package. Plus the type of package has to be considered - if someone chooses to install a different web server package or a different MTA or kernel, things could become complicated. You could avoid those problems by only having a partial local mirror of "allowed" packages and prevent changes to other packages (because the other packages are not listed) unless an admin moves an inactive sources.list into place. That then complicates automatic admin updates and adds another admin task, plus if someone does an autoremove before adding the full source list back ... generally that's a world of pain too. BTW: you don't actually need root to download and unpack packages - just as long as you unpack to an unprivileged path, it's just that this a whole different world of pain which is primarily to support chroots and rootfs creation etc. What are you trying to allow / prevent? If you want packages to behave normally, you need to install them normally... Anything else is just making the systems harder to administrate. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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