Running make as root and ./configure access to Makefile contents

Running make as root and ./configure access to Makefile contents

[Ian Grant]

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This is about the 66,00 lines of code that are in the confige script and
are not routinely audited and are typically run as root.

In http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-09/msg00098.html
Neil Jerram proclaims:

> People are absolutely NOT encouraged to run ./configure and
> make as root. In around 20 years of Guile development, I don't
> recall ever doing or encouraging that.

ian3@jaguar:~/build/guile-2.0.11$ ls -ld /usr/local
drwxr-xr-x 19 ian ian 4096 2014-08-11 23:39 /usr/local

What is the default setting of --prefix?

It doesn't matter that ./configure is not run as root, that script writes
the makefiles that are run as root to install the package.

This is GNU policy, but that doesn't in itself mean it isn't as really,
really stupid thing to do.

Ian

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Re: Running make as root and ./configure access to Makefile contents

[Ian Grant]

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From: Ed http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/misc/vanVlissingenInterview.html

As to the programming products that are used by people, I hardly have first
hand experience, my impression is that an enormous amount of user time is
wasted figuring out what the system does and how to control it, which is
the consequence of two sorts of happenings. First of all that the designers
have failed to keep the interface of a system as simple as possible—which
is a challenge; but as soon as you realize that the main challenge of
computer science is how not to get lost in the complexities of their own
making, it is quite clear that this is a major task.

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Re: Running make as root and ./configure access to Makefile contents

[Mark H Weaver]

Ian Grant <ian.a.n.grant@googlemail.com> writes:
> This is about the 66,00 lines of code that are in the confige script
> and are not routinely audited and are typically run as root.

Anyone can avoid using this intermediate shell code, by cloning our git
repo and running ./autogen.sh.  Anyone can independently verify this
intermediate output by doing this step themselves with the same
autotools versions and comparing the output.

> In http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-09/msg00098.html
> Neil Jerram proclaims:
>
>> People are absolutely NOT encouraged to run ./configure and
>> make as root. In around 20 years of Guile development, I don't
>> recall ever doing or encouraging that. 
>
> ian3@jaguar:~/build/guile-2.0.11$ ls -ld /usr/local
> drwxr-xr-x 19 ian ian 4096 2014-08-11 23:39 /usr/local
>
> What is the default setting of --prefix?
>
> It doesn't matter that ./configure is not run as root, that script
> writes the makefiles that are run as root to install the package.

There's nothing that we do in our "make install" that requires special
privileges, but obviously it needs to be able to write to the
destination directory.  There are several well-known ways to handle
this, from Debian's "fakeroot", the use of DESTDIR, or simply choosing
an installation prefix that the build user has write access to.

      Mark