Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C news: file ownership and running build 47386 times
Message-ID: <1989Nov19.001714.25018@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3054@splut.conmicro.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 89 00:17:14 GMT

In article <3054@splut.conmicro.com> jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard) writes:
>Which user id should unshar the C news sources?
>Which user id should own the programs?
>Which user id should run build?

The generic answer is "it depends on what you want".  On utzoo, the answer
is the same for all three:  "bin".  You should definitely run build, and
the programs it creates, as someone who has permission to write in the
source directories (e.g., the uid that unsharred the sources).  It is
convenient to have the programs (except the two setuid ones) owned by
the source owner.  If there is no uid that has permission to write on
both the source directories and the programs, you will have to compile
as one user and then do the installation as another.  (The current build
warns you about this.)

General paranoia suggests using a source/program uid that is not the one
the news subsystem will run under, i.e. is not "news" or your equivalent.
We're old-fashioned and prefer to work as bin to avoid the hazards
of making mistakes while running as root.  Some people running NFS prefer
to make everything root-owned, in the misguided belief that this provides
some extra degree of security.

>On top of all this, I've lost count of the times I've had to abort build
>because I forgot to tell it that I don't have mkdir(), or that my chown
>is /bin/chown, or... Can't build be set up to remember what it did last
>time? ...

This is coming.  Just to clarify:  this will *not* be a "configuration file"
that you can edit, it will merely be a way to have build use your last set
of answers as the defaults for a new run.  Making the former work right
is very difficult, while the latter is not too hard (although it requires
some overhaul of build, so don't expect it next week -- dbz has priority).
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu