[Mailman-Developers] Installing/upgrading Mailman, as root, or as mailman?

Chuq Von Rospach chuqui@plaidworks.com
Sun, 24 Sep 2000 23:23:24 -0700


At 11:10 PM -0700 9/24/00, Greg Connor wrote:
>My previous experience is that if I do a
>"make install" as root, instead of as mailman, it seems to screw up all
>the permissions, and I can never get it all set right again...

What I do, and I admit I probably shouldn't,is do my work as root. 
Mailman work fine if you do:

in source dir:

1) make install

in ~mailman:

2) chown -R mailman:mailman .
3) bin/check_perms -f (usually twice, or until it stops complaining)

Should it warn me not to do this? probably. Or perhaps check_perm 
should be run at the end of the make-install, and check_perm can be 
upgraded to do the chawn/chgrp/chmod as necessary... the latter 
causes the system to handle the situation, rather than simply saying 
"don't do that".

On the other hand, it's probably a good idea to discourage people 
from doing much work as root. I've been doing unix without a net for 
20 years now, and I'm comfortable with it (and careful!) -- but most 
folks shouldn't do it that way. In fact, I shouldn't either...

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"