wiki:pmagrath

Version 2 (modified by pmagrath@…, 16 years ago) (diff)

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Paul Magrath

  • IRC Nick: pmagrath
  • E-Mail: pmagrath AT macports.org

I'm a student of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin and one of the Google Summer of Code 2008 participants working on improving MacPorts.

My GSoC mentor is Rainer Müller.

I'm available in #macports on FreeNode as pmagrath.

branches/gsoc08-privileges

Summary

To implement facility to reduce need to execute MacPorts as root.

The Plan

The proposal is to implement a number of improvements to the MacPorts code base in order to reduce the need to execute MacPorts with root privileges.

Firstly, MacPort operations which do not explicitly need root privileges will be re-coded so that they will run with normal user privileges. Examples would include fetching, extracting and building the port.

Secondly, the portfile format shall be extended with an additional attribute to mark those ports that can not be installed without root privileges, such as those requiring StartupItems.

Thirdly, MacPort will allow users with full write permissions to /opt and its subfolders to install ports which only affect that hierarchy to install those ports without requiring root privileges.

Finally, MacPort will allow users to install packages into their own ~/opt instead of /opt when non root users wish to install a package for their own use only.

A stretch goal would be to modify MacPorts to drop root privileges for all but the install part of the port installation process.

I would feel that the best behavior for if MacPorts is requested to perform a privileged operation for a port, if it currently has no privileged access would be for the user to be given the choice of elevating privileges (by evoking sudo), installing in a fakeroot or aborting. The complications are that there is currently no way of knowing whether a port needs privileges, creating a fakeroot mechanism, cleanly elevating and de-elevating privileges.

Goals

1) Implementation of each of the four improvements mentioned above.
2) Ability to easily install common packages without root privileges.
3) (Long term) Use of MacPorts without root user account activation.

Tickets

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