Re: RFC: improving the shar installer

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/8/23 Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden>:

> What happens on an Ubuntu machine is that the command su
> exists but cannot be used since there is no password available
> to get root access, so your first if statement in root_install will
> be true. Also, if you use sudo then you should type in your
> user password, not the root password. However, when I try
> to run your sharhead.sh script, I notice two problems.
> First, it cannot be run at all with /bin/sh, which gives syntax
> errors. When I run it with bash, it runs, but I never get a chance
> to type in any password, but it directly prints out
>
>  Please type your administrator password...
> Could not launch installation as super-user.

Hi Mats, many thanks for having given it a try! May I ask what distro
you are running, and if it does include a "dialog" or "cdialog
package? Have you had a chance to see the ncurses-based installer at
all?
(hm, I have to say it worked well on my Mandriva, though this
shouldn't be an excuse :-)

I clearly need to invent a better check for su/sudo, maybe by checking
for existing files in /etc... I didn't know su was included in Ubuntu,
and therefore this was purely hypothetical.

As for the /bin/sh incompatibility, I definitely have to investigate
this. I always test this kind of scripts issuing the sh command, but I
have the feeling that it actually calls bash instead of /bin/sh...

Cheers,
Valentin