[GRASS5] file ownership after installation

[Roger Miller]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Hal Mueller wrote:

> I notice that, after building Grass 5 in a non-privileged user 
> account and then doing the "make install" as root, the final files in 
> the /usr/local/grass5 tree are owned by the user who did the build. 
> It's easy enough to fix with a chown -R, but for most installations I 
> think the default should be that files are owned by root after 
> installation, so that the non-privileged account can't accidentally 
> or deliberately modify something.  The change is in the "tar xf" call 
> where files are being copied from build location to installation 
> location--should be "tar xfo" to make the untarred files belong to 
> root instead of to the original creator.

Hal,

I don't know of anything in the GRASS5.0 distribution that needs to be
owned by root to work correctly.  I think in most systems if something
doesn't need to be owned by root, then it shouldn't be owned by root.

In my setup (Linux 2.4) the /usr/local/grass5 directory itself is owned by
root and users have only read and execute access to anything in the tree.  
As a result, the source is protected from tampering, even by the
unpriviledged user who owns the files.


Roger Miller
Lee Wilson and Associates.