allowing ordinary user (non-root) to run apt-get...dpkg...

[Walter Tautz <wtautz@math.uwaterloo.ca>]

i suppose there are a number of solutions ...

adding an appropriate group characteristic to
the executables and the places apt, dpkg write to
under /var and then adding users to the group...

setuid....not a good idea


some sort of server that runs on the host and receives
requests for software and it does the installs....

I am thinking of the situation where one has a large collection
of computers with many users. It would be an interesting experiment
to see which packages most users need rather than installing a huge
collection of packages by default. Instead  let the users determine their
needs provided they can use a better tool than apt-cache search or some
kind of user friendly frontend.

-walter