John> Agreed: that's why I tried to (and would have preferred to)
John> install as non-root, and was confused that I seemed to have to
John> be root to install, and then got a message that I would have to
John> be root to do make sinstall.
I have a very strong position on this. You do not have to be root for
"make install" unless your system is administrated so that have to be
root. In my view, requiring root permission to install in /usr/local
is a questionable system administration policy, but this is a very
religious topic and it is a waste of time to discuss this, especially
here on this list.
John> OTOH having installed many other bits of s/w I've got used to
John> the procedure: ./configure as user make as user make install as
John> root
John> It was even that way for Tcl and Tk so I assumed the same for
John> Scotty.
Once again, this works fine. The Tcl and Scotty Makefile are pretty
similar in this case.
>> [This is a very drastic as you make blindly all files readable,
>> which might be correct, but some exceptions might exist somewhere
>> in /usr/local/lib/*]
John> Agreed also: I didn't want to have to do that.
You did not have to do that. A better solution would have been to
either do make install again with a suitable umask or to do a chmod on
only those /usr/local/lib files installed by the scotty package, that
is /usr/local/lib/tnm2.1.* and /usr/local/lib/tkined1.4.*
John> Surely root should have a narrow umask, for security? You don't,
John> generally, want users to be able to read root's files - ?
One of the reasons for changing the administration policy so that you
do not need to be root to install software in /usr/local. :-)
John> Could the install script set an appropriate umask? Or, failing
John> that, how about a note in the readme about setting the umask to
John> get the right file permissions?
I believe that the Makefile should do what the system administrator
wants it to do and not try to do any "tricks".
John> How about something like this in the README?:
John> <insert text>To install in the default locations (under
John> /usr/local) on most|many systems you have to be root (although
John> only the ntping and straps programs actually have to be
John> installed with root permissions). To ensure files installed by
John> root are readable set umask to 022 before doing make install. If
John> you do not have (or do not want to use) root permission to
John> install in the default locations then you can set alternative
John> installation locations ...</insert>
This text can not hurt. I have added it to unix/README. Hope this
helps to avoid the problem in the future.
Juergen
Juergen Schoenwaelder schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw
Technical University Braunschweig, Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany. (Tel. +49 531 / 391 3283)
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