> 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@xxxxxxxx> > 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
