Fedora News Updates #1

[Gerry Doris]

> On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 09:25, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
>> On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 16:28, Colin Charles wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 19:12, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
>> > > I hope Fedora News stops instructing newbies to use root for
>> anything
>> > Erm, I don't think thats what I did.
>>
>> I don't know who actually wrote the article, but the article clearly
>> says:
>>
>> su -
>> cvs -d...
>> tar ...
>> rpmbuild ...
>> rpm ...
>
> I don't know about that specific article, but the one on creating an RPM
> of Acrobat used root for everything as well.  Unfortunately, the only
> way around using root for "rpmbuild", as far as I can tell, is to do
> "chmod -R user:user /usr/src".  Which I do myself, actually, but I am
> not sure of all the implications.
>
> True story:  an early version of the HP C compiler on HP-UX tried to "rm
> /dev/null" which, of course, succeeded if you ran cc as root and the
> system then crashed.  So I fully agree with the central idea of not
> using root unless you must.  I think the real question is, how best to
> not require root for things like rpmrebuild?
>
> --
> Stephen Walton <stephen.walton at csun.edu>
> Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Cal State Northridge

While I don't intend to enter the "root" debate I do believe it is unfair
to critique Colin for the content of the articles.  He's done a superb job
putting together the Fedora news site.  We can't expect that him to be
responsible for editing the articles too.


Gerry