Re: Simplifying package installation.

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 03:46:50AM +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
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> Hi
> 
> > multi-user systems or 'family' systems, where dishing out the root
> > password to everyone so that they can install their own stuff is not
> > an option.
> 
> If you don't trust people with the root password, you probably don't
> want to give them carte blanche to install things left, right and
> centre (even if it is in their "personal" rpm db). There are too many
> factors involved to allow them single click installation of any
> package into their personal db. I just plain don't like the idea. If a
> user wants a spreadsheet package installed, there is no harm in them
> asking the system admin to do it for them.

What the user can do is just simply download gnumeric.tgz and
compile it from source. There's no way you can stop him from doing
that, nor should there be. He can't do harm except for eating up
disk space.

I've been a Unix users on large systems, and I've always installed
the software I didn't really need but wanted to have for fun by myself.

Trusting the user with the root password is something entirely
different than trusting the user with a few megabytes of disk space.

I wouldn't want to be a user on a big system where everyone knows
the root password.

Ronald