Re: linux-2.6.14.tar.bz2 permissions

[Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org>]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 01:22:26AM -0800, David Brown wrote:
> > It certainly is not an excuse, but at least it my explain why nobody
> > noticed it before you :-)
> 
> Thanks for the info and suggestions ;)
> I trust Linus enough to compile a kernel as root... but maybe that's just me ;)

I don't, he's subject to errors just like any of us mere humans. I
wouldn't like anybody telling me he trusts my scripts or makefiles
and blindly runs them as root.

> (or maybe I trust that I can fix anything that can fsck up my system
> even with root perms ;))

I have an anecdote : several years ago, a collegue replaced me on a
benchmark platform during my hollidays. He wrote a few scripts to
help the guy doing the benchmarks, and one of his scripts archived
the logs and removed all the log directory and sub-directories to
prepare it for another run. When I came back, the guy doing the
benchs asked me to run this fresh new script to archive the logs,
which I tried. Unfortunately, it had to be run outside the log
directory so that it could find the directory name. One of its
lines was "rm -rf $LOGDIR/". Believe me, even on this Digital Unix
Alpha, it took a very long time to purge the directory when LOGDIR
was void, and we had to reinstall everything from scratch !

> I agree compiling the kernel as a non-root user is perfered but
> sometimes it doesn't happen that way...

Sudo generally helps here. It's even easy to put $SUDO in front
of sensible commands in build scripts and have SUDO=${SUDO-sudo}
at the beginning of the script.

Regards,
Willy