From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-05-15T11:00:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Can platform agnosticism be achieved?

On May 14, 9:42 pm, "ara.t.howard" <ara.t.how...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 14, 2008, at 4:51 PM, Albert Schlef wrote:
>
>
>
> > How to gain root priviledge is the user's own business. I may install
> > Ruby in my home directory, where I have write access to everything.
> > Putting 'sudo' thingies in Makefiles seems very wrong to me. Everybody
> > knows that when you install a unix program you do 'sudo make
> > install' or
> > 'su -c "make install"' *yourself*. It's *not* in the Makefile.
>
> no, you should *never* do this.  you should always do
>
>    ./configure --prefix=prefix
>    make
>    sudo make install
>
> although it's perhaps what you meant.  this is a key point, because
> programs like gems do all three.  if you were required to type
>
>    sudo gem install
>
> then certain things will not work (yes i know that you currently are
> required to do so) because gcc, ld, and other programs will silently
> behave differently when run as root, sometimes ignoring certain
> environment variables.  the inverse is also true - you cannot make a
> setuid binary as a regular user.  things like se-linux make this even
> more confusing and then there are programs which need to be compiled
> and owned by a certain user, like www, but which can only be written
> into system space as root.
>
> in short i really think the issue is windows not playing nice with
> everyone else and that projects like msys, which shim the windows os
> to be mostly posix compliant are the answer.  consider that msys
> addresses not only the sudo issue but the ar one, the gcc one, the ld
> one, the bison one, the sh one, etc, etc, etc.
>

Hmmn, are you talking about MSYS?

$ uname -a
MINGW32_NT-5.1 KEORE 1.0.11(0.46/3/2) 2007-07-29 17:16 i686 Msys

Luis@KEORE ~
$ sudo
sh: sudo: command not found

> for years i've personally always considered msys a requirement for any
> windows/ruby development, along side a hand compiled ruby, precisely
> because it gives not only ruby, but the tools ruby and it's programs
> require to operate at full speed.
>
> that said any script which uses sudo should at *least* do
>
>    SUDO = ENV['SUDO']
>
> so users can turn it off or possibly do some sort of test like
>
>    SUDO = system('sudo ls') ? 'sudo' : ''
>
> etc.
>
> anyhow, i feel your pain but think sudo the tip of a posix iceberg
> more cleanly addressed outside of ruby.
>

Yes, and you can add that sudo is not even there for other Linux or
*nix implementations, like Tiago exposed too.

I think is user responsibility, again.

Regards,
--
Luis Lavena