[gentoo-dev] Too root or not to root?

["Rob Cakebread" <robc@myrealbox.com>]

Hi,

I've written an editor/IDE for creating ebuilds (http://abeni.sf.net).
It requires the user to run it as root. In previous versions it ran as
a regular user and executed commands such as emerge and ebuild with sudo.

This worked ok but I had to do a lot of silly things because regular users
don't have read permissions below $WORKDIR. My app will open the configure
and Makefile automatically when you click the 'unpack' icon, for instance,
but I had to do some really kludgey things to check if the configure/Makefile
existed in ${S}. Then to read it I had to copy it to the /tmp dir with sudo
then read it in as regular user.

Is there a good reason that $WORKDIR isn't world readable? Should I just not
worry about it and continue requiring everyone run as root?

I notice other portage GUIs I've seen all require the user to run as root,
such as kportage, portagemaster etc, so maybe I shouldn't be concerned.


P.S.
Does anyone know of a Bash script beautifier? Mainly I need to convert spaces
to tabs in ebuilds and I'd rather use an external program if one exists.

Thanks,
Rob








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