Re: RFC: improving the shar installer (was: 2.11.56 problems)

[Mats Bengtsson]

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> 1 - is it possible (and wise) to have an installer script that is run
> as standard user, that offers to install as root and *only then* asks
> for a password?
>   
One practical problem is that the way to get root access differs from 
Linux distribution
to Linux distribution.  For some, like Ubuntu, the only possibility is 
to use sudo, whereas
many other distributions have not configured sudo this way, so you have 
to use su.
Whichever method is used in the script, it will make the installer 
useless (or less useful)
on the other distributions.
Also, if I ran an installation program that suddenly asked for my 
password (or even worse,
for the root password) I would get really suspicious. The best solution 
is probably what
Han-Wen proposed, namely to clarify the printouts, to say something like:

You're about to install LilyPond in $HOME/lilypond/ and the programs 
will be placed in
$HOME/bin/.
If you prefer to install LilyPond in /usr/local/lilypond with the 
programs placed in /usr/local/bin/,
then abort now and rerun the installer with root privileges, i.e. using
sudo sh lilypond-X.Y.Z-U.linux-x86.sh
or
su
sh lilypond-X.Y.Z-U.linux-x86.sh


A slightly more ambitious alternative is to let the installer check if 
$HOME/bin/ is in the
$PATH and issue more specific warnings and instructions in that case.


   /Mats