[TUHS] History of chown semantics

[Chris Nehren]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 21:13:55 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Larry McVoy scripsit:
> 
> > But with disk so bloody cheap and VMs working so bloody well, it's pretty
> > easy to spin up a VM and give it to some idiot who thinks they need root.
> 
> ./configure or not, it's damned hard to install large amounts of software
> without root.  You can do it, but it's hard, especially if some of it
> is really really expensive to build from source, since you're blocked
> from using the distro's own install tool.

How is this difficult? I've not had any problems that are
specific to the software not wanting to be installed as non-root.
You need to know some compiler flags like -R and ./configure
variables like CFLAGS and LDFLAGS, but other than that I've not
seen any problems that really stick out in my memory.

> Most people who use Unix today are the only ones there.  Someone should
> really rewrite finger(1) to do something different.

What do you do that this is the case? I'd literally be out of a
job if I didn't have a gaggle of users to look after. And so
would my entire team of coworkers. This is such a bewildering
claim to me and everyone I know that we can't fathom how it's
true.

-- 
Chris Nehren