[GRASS-dev] GEM Wizard question

[William Kyngesburye]

I've been meaning to ask about this root/external mod issue - is  
there any plan to support installation of GEM modules in a user dir?   
More than just a problem of HOW to run this as root in the GUI, it's  
also a bit of a security problem and a platform standardization issue.

On OSX, installing extras into an application binary is not the way  
things are done.  They should be installed in a standard plugin/ 
extension location for the application - /Library so it is globally  
available to users, or ~/Library to make it available only for a  
single user.

These locations act as extra GIS_BASEs, in effect - they have bin,  
lib, etc, doc... subfolders.  By use of standard GRASS env vars, they  
are easily included into the GRASS environment, and I recently added  
similar env vars and functions to locate external etc/ support files  
for modules that need it.

For the OSX application build I've set [~]/Library/GRASS/$version/ 
Modules as the global/user locations.  For now I have a separate  
module build template, much like GEM, but built modules must then be  
manually copied to one of these locations, since I'm too lazy to  
figure out alternate install targets in the makefiles.

It would be nice to have GEM able to install in these locations at  
least, if not also arbitrary locations.  We would need to figure out  
good standard locations for other platforms also.


On May 21, 2007, at 5:53 AM, Maris Nartiss wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm not following GEM development and thus have two silly questions:
> 1) isn't possible to install additional modules via GEM into user's
> home directory (as option)? Thus it could be made as easy as
> installing some addons to Firefox.
> 2) if getting superuser support for GUI right is lot of work, could
> some GUI wizard just generate some commandline expression that could
> be just pasted into terminal by user as last step to run it via su or
> sudo?
>
> Just my 0.02.
> Maris.
>
>
> 2007/5/21, Benjamin Ducke <benjamin.ducke at ufg.uni-kiel.de>:
>> I guess it wouldn't be too much trouble. GEM already has all that's
>> needed for this: zipped extension packages can be downloaded (using
>> wget), unzipped (to system's temp dir) and installed automatically.
>> There is just one catch: since all files are installed into system- 
>> wide
>> locations, the wizard will probably need superuser rights. So a  
>> tcl/tk
>> based install wizard needs to provide a way to get the superuser
>> password and run system commands with elevated rights.

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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