Re: Install program

[Marc Ewing <marc redhat com>]

"Ben 'The Con Man' Kahn" <xkahn@mail.cybersites.com> writes:
> On Sun, 19 Apr 1998, Marc Ewing wrote:
> 
> > This won't happen.  At least not in grpm.  It'd need to be suid root
> > to do that, and there is no way I'm going to do that :-).  If you
> > want to install as root, you'll need to su and then run grpm.  Or,
> > you can implement any policy you like with sudo.
> 
> 	Umm.. Then how does SGI do this?  I checked the SGI I have access
> to. I ran SoftwareManager...  It started up with a dialog box askign for
> the root password.  (Or I could click cancel and it would allow me to
> view data, but not change anything.)  I checked the file, and it was not
> suid root or anything else.  What is so special about what they're doing
> that we can't do?

I'm not saying it's an impossible thing to do.  There are certain
ways to design it so that it can be done safely, but grpm isn't
designed that way.  grpm uses librpm directly to do all RPM
operations - it doesn't just call rpm to do the work.  Thus, you'll
need whatever permissions you need in grpm itself.  That's why
I suggest using sudo if you want to allow certain non-root people
to install system packages.

-Marc