Re: texconfig in tetex-3.0 again

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 08:13:11AM -0400, George White wrote:
> 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.

Precisely!  And as a corollary a "personal" TeX configuration for
root does make a little sense if any at all.  I hope that instances
where people run whatever in TeX from a root account are few and far
between.  Therefore it would be way saner if tools used for years to
configure an initial system-wide _installation_ of teTeX, and this
is exactly a root role,  would not change their actions all of
sudden and instead require some "special moves" if you would truly
need something exceptional for root.  The fact that they allow you
to do your own adjustments on non-root accounts is very valuable but
this does not change the above.

OTOH milk was already spilled and that is why I suggested that some
warnings that you are possibly not doing what you think that you
might be doing would be really desirable.

> When I was installing teTeX on multi-user systems I always used a
> non-privileged account for teTeX.

Even if you are running all of that from some "special" account (I
do not see any real need for that as nothing there runs, or it
should run, suid and your own additions/adjustments are fully
supported) then this should be "nologin" type of account and setting
it and an installation has to be done by root again.

>  Now I just install it for my personal use.

So you think that everybody should have their own teTeX installation
on a multi-user machine?  Thanks, but I would rather not got there
for many reasons.

> Useful features that benefit a small number of users should not be
> a priority.

Sorry, I fail to understand what you are talking about here.  Do you
mean that likely miniscule group, if indeed it is non-empty,  which
benefits from a new behaviour of texconfig for root?

    Michal