Re: Sysadmins

[Bas Wijnen]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 07:39:51PM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> Again as a user I hope this would be useful:
> In my experience if it turns out, a sysadmin is lazy, then sometimes I
> start to feel I have to get back to paper technology. Once i had to make a
> graphics and I tend to use Gnuplot. And it turned out that our admin had
> upgraded something and one library required for gnuplot was not installed
> so i had to use MS Excel, because the features in OpenOffice.org were not
> enyough yet. I think it is a problem, when the sysadmin has too much
> power. It is better to allow the user to install programs.

You can.  In a case like this, where you want gnuplot right now and not wait
for the admin to fix the system (which may take a long time), you can just
install the library in your home dir and use that through LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
(That assumes this happens on a GNU/Linux box, which seems unlikely if you can
run MS Excel on it.  Ah well, you get the point I hope.)

It should be *allowed* for users to install their own executables and others
should be able to use them if the owner allows that.  This is already the case
on GNU/Linux.  You can create ~/bin and add it to your PATH in
.bashrc/.bash_profile.  Then you can add links to other joe's programs in
~joe/bin to there, so they are in your path.  Or optionally, you can add
~joe/bin to your path so everything he creates will automatically work.  Note
that this requires quite a lot of trust in both cases.

This is a very explicit way of trusting other people's processes.  I think
this is good.

Thanks,
Bas

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