Fedora News Updates #1

[Stephen Walton]

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