Aw: Re: Installation: Manual text

[Laurence Finston]

Most people have their own computers nowadays and I never log on as `root' or 
as a user with root permissions unless I have to.  None of the software I've 
worked on in the last 10 years plus requires root permissions for anything 
(installing or running) so I always install it somewhere under my home 
directory.

I therefore think that /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or any such directory is a 
poor choice for the default for `configure' because it will always fail if 
users don't happen to have root permissions and if they do, they might well 
overwrite an existing version of the software that came with the installation 
or they installed later with synaptic, apt-get, or whatever, or by hand, for 
that matter.

Thanks for the reference to `autopoint'.  I've used `gettext' but I don't 
remember using `autopoint'.  Maybe I just forgot.  I remember having heard of 
autogen.sh.  I've never used it for my own software and I like to know the 
individual steps of how to build a package.

No matter how common the "common lore" is, someone's going to not have heard of 
it.  I first started using various commercial versions of Unix in 1991 and 
GNU/Linux around 2003.  It's too bad, in a way, but I've never felt that I was 
part of a "band".

> Gesendet: Samstag, 09. April 2022 um 03:01 Uhr
> Von: "Jose A. Ortega Ruiz" <mail@jao.io>
> An: "Laurence Finston" <Laurence.Finston@gmx.de>
> Cc: bug-mdk@gnu.org
> Betreff: Re: Installation:  Manual text
>
> On Tue, Apr 05 2022, Laurence Finston wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > I haven't checked this, but apart from being able to install in, e.g.,
> > /usr/bin, I can't imagine there would be any need for `root'
> > permissions with respect to MDK.
>
> The default would actually be /usr/local/bin, if i recall correctly, and
> no, none of the MDK utilities need root permission to run; but by
> putting them in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin we're not making them run
> with root permissions, just making them easily available by default to
> all users in the machine (they'll still run with the permissions of the
> user invoking them).  But a note in the docs won't hurt anyone, of
> course (it's just again that two decades ago those things were "common
> lore" to the much smaller band of gnu/linux aficionados :)).
>
> Cheers,
> jao
> --
> Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer.
>   -Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)
>