Re: Running tlmgr/tlshell with sudo

Bruno, I'm somewhat baffled. If you run any command as sudo, anything
that's created will have root ownership. Using -H or not is immaterial.
I don't believe our scripts ever try to chown anything, and I don't
think they should.

You-all have said that it's standard practice to use sudo to install
things on the Mac. So I do not know how you ever end up with a TL tree
that is not entirely owned by root -- does the MacTeX installer chown
everything after? Or maybe it is owned by root, and that's ok? But your
msg implies otherwise.

--

Norbert did insert code into fmtutil and updmap to try to avoid the need
for -H, but this is a different question from the ownership of what is
created. Here are his comments (it's the same for fmtutil):

  # $HOME and sudo and updmap-sys horror
  #   some instances of sudo do not reset $HOME to the home of root
  #   as an effect of "sudo updmap" creates root owned files in the home 
  #   of a normal user, and "sudo updmap-sys" uses map files and updmap.cfg
  #   files from the directory of a normal user, but creating files
  #   in TEXMFSYSCONFIG. This is *all* wrong.
  #   we check: if we are running as UID 0 (root) on Unix and the
  #   ENV{HOME} is NOT the same as the one of root, then give a warning
  #   and reset it to the real home dir of root.
  sub reset_root_home { ... }

As far as I can tell, no other scripts (not tlmgr, not install-tl, not
tlshell, not anything) have this kludge. Maybe I'm wrong.


So, overall, I'm not sure what to do about this. --thanks, karl.