Re: texconfig in tetex-3.0 again

Quoting "Fabio S." <[email protected]>:

> ...
> >
> > The problem with that is that all of this clearly violates "a principle
> > of the least surprise".  People who over years used 'texconfig'
> > "know" how it works and undobtely I am far from the only one who
> > fell into that trap.
> 
> I was one of them some months ago.

Good practice limits the programs run by "root" to the bare necessities. When I
was installing teTeX on multi-user systems I always used a non-privileged
account for teTeX.  Now I just install it for my personal use.

> > I understand that things do change but if somebody is trying to use
> > 'texconfig' as root then there is currently a really serious chance
> > that s/he is attempting a wrong thing.  It does not seem to be a
> > very hard to check;  so at least in such situation a warning in a
> > style "Are you really sure that you know what you are doing?  Maybe
> > you really meant 'texconfig-sys' instead?" could be displayed with a
> > possible option that allows to suppress that if trully unwarranted.
> > The same goes for other two utilities.  That would go a very long
> > way to alleviate the problem.
> 
> I agree.

Useful features that benefit a small number of users should not be a priority.
It is is important to your situation, do it for your site and offer a patch back
to the community.  Even if it never makes it into the main package, other sites
that share your problem would be free to use the patch.
 
> To generate the minimum of confusion, maybe one could have left texconfig 
> only for (root) system wide configuration, as it was used since ever, and 
> use "texconfig-user" for user configuration...

teTeX is not the only package that suffers from this problem.  There are 2
underlying issues:

1.  for security reasons, many sites multi-user systems no longer allow users
to
write to shared areas (e.g. /tmp, etc.) 

2.  as a consequence, and because disk is cheaper than sys admins, many
packages
have moved to a configuration that is installed and configured by each user on
a
personal workstation or entirely within the user's "home" area on a multi-user
system.  For many sites, sys admins are expected to make security and
operational support their priority and aren't expected install anything that
isn't vendor and site "standard", so if a user wants a current teTeX, they must
install and manage it without sys admin privileges or assistance.

For a free package like teTeX where users don't pay for support, decisions 
must be made in a way that minimizes the problems for the majority of users so
the maintainers aren't buried by support requests.

Given this background, administrators configuring teTeX for multiple users
should realize they are now an atypical cases and should expect "surprises" and
be prepared to do a little extra work, including setting up a special
tetex-admin account, changes to the default texmf.cnf, patching or renaming
texconfig, etc.  

-- 
George N. White III
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia