dmd: running as non-root user

dmd: running as non-root user

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Hello,

On the back of me looking at the manual and my resulting playing with
dmd (which is a pretty cool program by the way), I've come across the
following:

Running dmd as a non-privileged user currently results in (by default):
- log: ~/.dmd.log
- config: ~/.dmdconf.scm
- an attempt being made to create a socket at
  $LOCALSTATEDIRE/var/run/dmd/socket, which fails because poor muggins
  has no write permissions there (from what I can tell).

I would propose changing the above, Emacs stylee, so that we get the
following by default:
- log: ~/.dmd/dmd.log
- config: ~/.dmd/init.scm (or dmdconf.scm if preferred, though init is
  probably better known to people familiar with emacs.)
- socket: ~/.dmd/socket

Then, when a newbie starts playing with dmd we can simply point them to
that one directory for exploration in the manual. We can also then move
to dmd checking for the existence of the folder and creating files as
necessary, and changing the permissions of the .dmd folder so dmd itself
considers it secure (if dmd created the folder: if it already existed,
then do what it does now and simply emit an 'insecure' warning).

Instead of, when running as non-root, having to do
$ dmd -s ~/.dmd/socket
to start dmd and then
$ deco ACTION SERVICE -s ~/.dmd/socket
for every deco command we could simply do
$ dmd
and 
$ deco ACTION SERVICE

I think that would make it a more useful tool for managing your own
daemons, and it would also become more newbie friendly.

I'm happy to implement the above, or whatever comes out of this
discussion.

What do you think?

Best wishes,

Alex

Re: dmd: running as non-root user

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com> skribis:

> Running dmd as a non-privileged user currently results in (by default):
> - log: ~/.dmd.log
> - config: ~/.dmdconf.scm
> - an attempt being made to create a socket at
>   $LOCALSTATEDIRE/var/run/dmd/socket, which fails because poor muggins
>   has no write permissions there (from what I can tell).
>
> I would propose changing the above, Emacs stylee, so that we get the
> following by default:
> - log: ~/.dmd/dmd.log
> - config: ~/.dmd/init.scm (or dmdconf.scm if preferred, though init is
>   probably better known to people familiar with emacs.)
> - socket: ~/.dmd/socket

That makes sense, yes.

(I realized I’m running dmd unprivileged with --prefix=$HOME/foo, so it
had no problem with the socket directory.  But that’s definitely not the
common case.)

[...]

> I think that would make it a more useful tool for managing your own
> daemons, and it would also become more newbie friendly.

Agreed.

> I'm happy to implement the above, or whatever comes out of this
> discussion.
>
> What do you think?

I think it’s a good idea!  :-)  The relevant bits are in support.scm.

Thanks,
Ludo’.