Re: libtool-1.5.18 -- installed files owned by non-root user

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> * Peter Breitenlohner wrote on Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 10:59:03AM CEST:
> > Incidentally, that kind of "dancing around" is in no way unique to libtool.
>
> Care to elaborate?  Which other packages do this?

I just checked that both emacs-21.4 and xemacs-21.4.17 do something like
        (cd ${src} && tar cf -) | (cd ${dst} && umask 022 & tar xf -)
which preserves the timestamps and unfortunately ownership as well. If I
remember correctly there are a few other packages doing either the same
thing or "cp -p" (or similar).

With GNU tar one could of course use either
        tar cf - --owner=0 --group=0
or
        tar xf --no-same-owner
but that will fail for other tar implementations.

> > At the moment, I use a shell script (bash) which does something like this:
> >
> >         ....
> >         make install-strip || exit
> >         [ `id -u` == 0 ] && chown -R root: $prefix/share/$pkg
>
> Why not
>   chown -R `id -u`:`id -g` $prefix/share/$pkg
> here, unconditionally?  ......

Well, I either install as me (owning everything to be installed) or as root;
thus the simple procedure above is good enough for me. Moreover whenever I
create files as non-root, these files are owned automatically by me (at
least on our linux systems).

> .......  Are there systems where chown does not
> understand the uid:gid syntax?

Certainly no posix compliant ones, but then if there were no others much of
Autoconf&Co would be superfluous.

regards         Peter