Re: Su && Development Packages
<bart@gigabee.com> wrote:
[attribution lost]
>> a).
>> This has to have been asked a million times, but I can't find
>> anything in the archives related to this topic: What packages do I
>> need to fetch to be able to compile most software (i.e. Apache, X
>> apps, etc.)?
>
>Can we *please* get a serious answer to this question? I've tried to
>find it numerous times without any luck and it's ridiculous. The beauty
>of Debian is that you can install a clean, unbloated system that's easy
>to maintain. However, one thing that's always been keeping me down is
>compiling programs. Packaged versions easily set up all the packages
>you need for that, but if you're installing a base system, then how are
>you supposed to get it to compile programs properly? How about a list
>of *all* the packages that are installed when you enable the C
>development/compiling environment (or whatever it's called) in a
>packaged (i.e. store bought bundle) version of Debian or any other
>flavor of Linux?
Why don't you get the package tasksel (for potato) and look for
yourself?
Besides, this is what the task-devel-* packages (again from potato) are
for; they're probably the best answer to your question.
>And please don't give me ridiculous answers like "download the packages
>the app requires".
For most people this isn't a ridiculous answer; if you're compiling a
program then (assuming some development experience) it's *common*
*sense* to have the development packages associated with whatever that
program depends on. And for people on the end of a dialup it's
*ridiculous* (your word) to download all the development packages in
Debian (grep-available lists 358 here) on the off-chance that someday
they might want to compile code for a Beowulf cluster or a voxel
renderer or what have you. You don't install everything: this is what
dependencies are all about, and people writing their own software are
expected to be intelligent enough to figure out what they need (see my
next paragraph before you blow up).
Eventually (for woody, I believe) all packages will have to have
Build-Depends: fields to pull in specialist development packages; in
fact, this is in the current version of policy. With a bit of luck this
might be integrated with 'apt-get source' or something, but I haven't
been following development of apt. This ought to help random users to
compile a package from source.
>I'm talking about having all the packages needed so that it'll be a
>sure bet that most, if not all, of the times that I try to compile a
>program (*any* program), it'll work.
You don't know much about development, do you? At least not if you mean
"any program" as opposed to "any Debian source package". Programming is
not a fully automatic process or we'd all be out of a job.
Install task-devel-* and *-dev if you care that much. This isn't the
ideal solution for most people, though.
>Don't people on this list compile programs?!? Geesh!
Ease off on the ranting, already.
>> All of a sudden, su has starting to behave very strange.
>> When I login with my normal user account then try to su to root, I get:
>> % su
>> su: Authentication failure
>> Sorry
>> %
>
>Hmm, I always used 'su root' to su into root.
See su(1):
Invoked without a username, su defaults to becoming the
super user.
(Personally, I normally use 'su -' so that I get a sane environment.)
Things like this can sometimes be caused by PAM; /etc/pam.d/su would be
the place to look here. Ben Collins has already found the cause of this
particular problem, though.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]
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