Re: Installing package *NOT* in repository
On Tue 21 Aug 2018 at 14:48:25 (+0200), tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 08:02:02AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Odd, maybe apt does not look in $PATH?
>
> There's no reason to assume that, unless when looking for an executable
> (i.e. those things which tend to live in /bin and /usr/bin).
… and then it will of course be hashed, and so waste no time at all.
But Gene's mention of $PATH was a complete red herring. Or cargo cult.
And consider this: it would be seriously mental to place downloaded
files, which might even have been obtained from untrusted sources,
and stick them in your $PATH ready for execution.
> Actually, dpkg's man page mentions $PATH, but only for searching
> executables, which is to be expected. Not for searching packages.
Yes, and I think one can see why dpkg explicitly mentions $PATH. It
uses a lot of helper programs for unpacking archives, computing MD5s,
etc, and $PATH is where they're expected to be. Expected, but people
using dpkg from the commandline might well have seriously broken
systems with missing or incompatible binaries, and --force-bad-path
attempts to deal with that.
> To me, it would be a surprise.
IMO it would be a grave bug in the Debian project's thinking.
Cheers,
David.
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