Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!snorkelwacker!ira.uka.de!fauern!lan!kandler From: kandler@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kandler) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Software installation opinions needed Summary: Binary installation programs. Do or don't? Message-ID: <4547@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> Date: 20 Sep 90 08:35:51 GMT References: <25908@shamash.cdc.com> <1990Sep19.125944.6489@cs.utk.edu> Sender: news@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de Reply-To: matthias.kandler@informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Kandler) Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, TU Muenchen, Germany Lines: 24 In article emery@linus.mitre.org (David Emery) writes: > I get VERY UPSET by 3rd party installations that must be done as >'root'. An installation script should NOT require that it be run by the >superuser to do mundane things such as get the stuff off the tape, >... >other than root. Besides, in this era of viruses, etc, who knows what >an installation script is doing to your system? > Yes, that's the reason why I always read a script before I execute it as root. And that's the reason why I get EVEN MORE UPSET if an installation is not a script but a binary. Therefore I decided to leave SunOS suninstall and friends alone and write my own installation scripts. (Another reason is, that suninstall is so highly interactive. It's very boring to install 40+ Suns and to answer the same questions everytime.) I admit that Sun is not 3rd party but 1st party. But this makes no difference im my eyes. I want to know _exactly_ what a installation does to my system. Someone in this thread mentioned DEC's 'setld'. I too think, that's the way to go. (I implemented a kind of 'setld' on our Suns. Sorry :-) ~~ Matthias Kandler Institut f. Informatik TU Muenchen kandler@informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de Postfach 20 24 20 Telefon: +49 89 2105 2025 D-8000 Muenchen 2