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From: igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten)
Newsgroups: alt.flame,comp.sources.wanted,comp.editors,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Super-simple UNIX editor
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Date: 21 Jun 91 11:31:23 GMT
References: <17174@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <1991Jun21.012239.4994@cbfsb.att.com> <1991Jun21.040309.26255@leland.Stanford.EDU>
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In article <1991Jun21.040309.26255@leland.Stanford.EDU> fangchin@leland.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang) writes:
> As a SA myself, I said "installing emacs requires root privilage" with the
> following understanding:

Wow.  He's an SA.  He must be right.  I've installed emacs without being
root several times.

> Whenever BIG disk space is required, root privilage (at least stuff or source
> privilage) is required.  I have had a quite interesting discussion with Thomas
> at MIT regarding this point.

And I've spoken to another man to whom you can say Wow.  Hint: not
everyone runs BSD.  And of those that do, not everyone runs quotas.  And
of those that do, not everyone has quotas so small you can't build
emacs.

> May I ask you, can anyone at your site write to /usr/local?

Why would they need to?  I've built emacs in /usr/igb before now.

>                can everyone at your site have more than 20 megs disk
quota?

Yes.  And everywhere I've been.

>                (and that's just sufficient to decompress and build this thing)

What else would you want to do with it?

And anyway, if you know someone who has the same machine-type as you,
they can compile it and give you a binary.  My bare-essentials tape that
I use on all the machines we used to build has emacs in about 1.8M (by
deleting all the .el files for which you have a .elc, etc).

> At our site, a typical user has only four megs, I don't think this is even good
> for holding the compressed GNU emacs distribution.  I routinely build emacs 
> for our four platforms, DECs, IBMs, SUNs,  MIPs, I said "root privilage" required
> out of practical considerations.

Right.  ``Because my system is so tightly regulated that I can't build
emacs without being root, neither can anyone else anywhere.''

> As another perhaps interesting point here:  If you build emacs on a system
> using Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), then a file system's last 10% (?) can be
> only written to by root.  An example, say your /usr has 100 megs, and it has
> 30 megs free space left, and say you are a common user trying to build emacs
> in this file system, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO, for the reason given above.

Right.  And if you're an SA who believes that root SHOULD write in the
10% reserve, I suggest you read a manual or two.

> one directory?  If during account checking, I find someone put a complete 
> emacs in his/her $HOME, I would ask this user why, and why indeed.

You poke around in your user's directories?  My, what a fine SA you are.
Do your users know?

ian