RE: Failed clisp-2.49.93+ in FreeBSD

[email protected] writes:

 >  - During configuration, compilation & build NOTHING should require
 >  root access.

I'm not sure how to interpret "should" or "build" in that sentence.
I'd include running the tests as part of build, and I recall a few
tests that do require root in order to pass.  
(One that comes to mind is creating raw sockets.)

 > Generally, you configure and build SW as a low-privilege user, best
 > inside a jail,

So if the entire process were inside a chroot or vm or container
you wouldn't mind root access, right?  Perhaps this would be a
good way to at least run the tests above.

 > so the poor configuration scripts can't destroy your system
 > inadvertently.  Once that is over, you install, i.e. copy few
 > selected files to privileged locations as root.

It's interesting that we're supposed to trust the software that
was built from the scripts that we're not supposed to trust.
I do get your point that the configuration scripts are likely
to be written with less attention than the code intended to run
in the built system.  This suggests that someone who actually 
wants to plant malware into a system should concentrate on the 
configuration scripts.

I suppose the testing code falls somewhere between the configuration
script code and the code intended to run in the built system in terms
of attention.  If that testing code has to run as root, that would
make it a good target as well.

I suppose you'd recommend never running lisp as root.  
(It turns out I do that all the time.)  
For that matter, you probably don't recommend running anything else
as root (which I also do all the time).
Perhaps this view makes more sense in the case where a single machine
is shared by many users who all rely on it - the common case before
computers became "personal" (starting about 40 years ago).

Many of the machines I use now have users other than root only because
they were created by default.  I think in at least one case that
user has only ever been used to do one thing: build clisp because
the script doesn't want to run as root!


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