Re: Simplifying package installation.

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Sun, Aug 29, 1999 at 10:07:10PM -0700, Derek Simkowiak wrote:
> > (A possibility to specify a list of additional trusted users on a
> > per user basis would be ok.)
> 
> 	It's called "group permissions", maybe you've heard of them.  I
> don't see why we need to re-invent the Unix security model just because we
> have a GUI desktop.

It's not. I'm talking about a scheme with multiple rpm dbs, and each user
can specify which dbs are trusted.

Users can't create or modify groups, it takes root to do that.
It might be possible to do something with groups here, but that's only
needed if a user doesn't want his rpm db to be readable for everyone
else. Which is quite possible of course.

> 
> 	Someone here mentioned MS Windows NT required that you be the
> Administrator (read: root) to install new libs and packages.  That sounds
> like a reasonable plan to me.
> 
> 	I'm beginning to think we don't really need user-level installs.

Users need user level installs. Users will do user level installs.

> Miguel's original message was that installs need to be easier.  At this
> point, it looks like user-level installs will make things harder, not
> easier.  The prior example of the wife wondering why Gnumeric isn't in her
> menu when the husband knows he installed it is a good one.

Not a problem at all. If they don't know any better, then let the wife
install a duplicate copy. Eats some of her disk space, but that's not
really a problem. If she runs out of disk space she will probably
communicate with root at which point it might become clear that gnumeric
should be installed system wide.

It's exactly how it is done currently at universities. People need
programs to do computations, install them by themselves in their
home directories, and at some point the system administrators will
install it system wide.

> 
> 	We just need an easy installation GUI that prompts the user for
> the root password when installing a new package.  That would make it easy
> (no need to log in again, or "su", or anything--you'd just need to know
> the root password).  Have that installation program act as a wrapper
> around the system's native packaging format (RPM, DEB, ...whatever).
> 

That would be nice, but most users won't know the root password, and
they shouldn't be required to beg root to install say an mp3 player
if there's no such thing currently. Users just want to download the
thing and put it on their system, they don't want to wait for the
moment that root finds a little time to do this.

Ronald