From: Erez Zadok (ezk@cs.columbia.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 26 1999 - 18:01:16 EST
In message <199901262239.PAA20570@sal.cs.utah.edu>, Godmar Back writes:
>
> I consulted two experienced sysadmins (well, as experienced as you're
> going to get if you're part of one of the few successful ISP startups,
> like Dave is), and this is their opinion:
>
> Jeff says:
>
> You think it would ask first, wouldnt you? From the "security" section
> of the man page:
>
> "In addition to building a set of hints for quick lookup, [ldconfig]
> also serves to specify the trusted collection of directories from
> which shared objects can be safely loaded."
>
> Dave says:
>
> I'm with Jeff here. It should prompt the user before running
> anything which changes a system-wide parameter such as the ldconfig
> path. Alternately, it should support a separate target, "make
> touchup" which does the sensitive parts of the install.
>
> - Godmar
I disagree. I've been doing sysadmin for over 10 years, and managing teams
thereof, and I would NOT want a "make install" to stop and prompt me for
anything. If I'm su-ed to root, I want make install to run ldconfig. If
I'm not, then I don't mind if it'll run ldconfig and fail or avoid running
it at all (the way make install of gnu sh-utils will not install su unless
you're running as root.)
I don't mind if we choose to have the default behavior changed to run
ldconfig based on an option or disable it based on an option or even make
another option that will interactively ask if to run ldconfig. But please
do not make the default behavior of anything automatically configured via
libtool interactive. That will mess people up when building/running stuff
from other scripts/tools.
Erez.
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