[gentoo-user] Re: sudo in kernel config ?

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 09/11/2010 11:51 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 22:34 on Saturday 11 September 2010, Nikos
> Chantziaras did opine thusly:
>
>> On 09/11/2010 11:18 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>> Apparently, though unproven, at 11:46 on Saturday 11 September 2010,
>>> Albert
>>>
>>> Hopkins did opine thusly:
>>>> On Sat, 2010-09-11 at 10:24 +0200, Stéphane Guedon wrote:
>>>>> few months ago, I read linux kernel in a nutschell(sic), and the author
>>>>> wrote we shouldn't do kernel operations (config and build) as root.
>>>>
>>>> I call bullsh*t.  I've been compiling kernels for 17 years and for the
>>>> most part have done it as root without any problems.
>>>
>>> Same here.
>>>
>>> The root user (sometimes portage) creates /usr/src/linux-*
>>>
>>> Someone tell me again exactly how user alan is supposed to build those
>>> sources?
>>
>> chown -R
>
> I utterly fail to see the point of this prohibition against building as root.
>
> Sure, it makes sense when I'm installing perl stuff for my users and last
> command is sudo make install. But for everything else?

Well, running GCC and Make as root raises the same concerns as running 
any other program as root.

In the case of Gentoo, this isn't too important though, since in Gentoo, 
you don't build your software in your home dir and then "sudo make 
install", but portage will run GCC as root anyway.

With other distros, you never run GCC/Make/etc as root.  In Gentoo you 
do, so there's no point in reading too much into this.