On Sun, Oct 02, 2022 at 08:57:13AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>
> > Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, david@tethera.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
> >  akrl@sdf.org
> > Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2022 15:42:06 -0500

[...]

> > And if it's a multi-user machine, with a lot of emacs users, at the
> > moment I don't see any reason to want to compile the same file 50 times
> > for 50 users (or even more than just once), incurring the attendant
> > power and storage costs.
> 
> I don't think you should try to second-guess the user who installs a
> package.  They could just want to study the sources, for example.

That's what apt-get source and friends are. The user can download,
build, modify, etc. the sources corresponding to packages. Those
are purely user operations, no admin powers needed.

But installing a binary pacage on a system does modify the system
for all users, so admin powers do make sense there. Nobody is being
second-guessed, just the roles separated (again, on a single user
system, this might feel artificial).

Cheers
-- 
t