FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

Well, FreeTDS is nothing special in this regard, however, assuming
/usr/local is in its default ownership of root.root then yes you will need
root when installing anything to /usr/local including freetds.

Your setup is particularly wise, and freetds would installable by a
privileged (but not root) user just fine.
 
The pointed out failing of FreeTDS not installing w/o root is not a
freetds thing but a unix/linux thing.  It really has nothing to do with
FreeTDS.

However, most rpms install in /usr not /usr/local so this doesn't help
there.

Brian

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark J. Lilback wrote:

> At 9:35 AM -0600 10/18/2001, Darryl Friesen wrote:
> >That just goes without saying.  What unix software packages _can_ you
> >install without being root?  Even most binary distributions require you be
> >root before you can install them.  You mention having the Sybase java 
> >stuff;
> >surely you must have been root to install that as well?
> 
> I install almost every package w/o being root. I change /usr/local 
> permissions to allow the sysadmin group to have write permissions, 
> that way I can have junior sys admins do work with root access.
> 
> Call me paranoid, but rarely will I ever let something run/install as 
> root without knowing exactly what will happen. This is especially a 
> problem with Apple's built-in installer on Mac OS X. It uses pax 
> which has some really nasty bugs. There was a third party app that 
> would trash all kinds of stuff when it installed. (I think the 
> problem is something to do with symlinks.) Also, installers 
> frequently change permissions in ways that I don't want them changed. 
> (This happens when opening up tarballs, too.)
> 
> And java certainly doesn't have to be installed as root, as you get 
> to specify where it should look for third party libraries (just like 
> you can set your own LD_LIBRARY_PATH to access private libraries 
> instead of the system ones).
> 
> The only thing that should have to be installed as root is something 
> that needs to chown or make a file setuid. Proper permission tuning 
> should be able to handle everything else.
> 
>