Re: RFC: improving the shar installer

[Mats Bengtsson]

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> Hi Mats, many thanks for having given it a try! May I ask what distro
> you are running, 
Ubuntu TLS 8.04
> and if it does include a "dialog" or "cdialog
> package? Have you had a chance to see the ncurses-based installer at
> all?
>   
Now I have, but the problem remains the same.
> 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.
>   
I'm not sure it's possible. Sudo can be configured to only
do specific tasks, and the only way for a normal user to find
out what is allowed, is to run
sudo -l
which in turn requires that the user enters his password,
so then you could just as well try to run the installation
command directly and check if it works or fails. However,
this means that you first have to ask the user to type in
his own password, then if you discover that sudo wasn't
configured to allow the installation, then you have to ask
him to type in the root password.

> 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...
>   
Yes, on many systems /bin/sh is actually bash.

  /Mats