[arch-general] makepkg as root

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2015 13:35:52 -0500, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> '--asroot' was removed with deliberation and forethought.
> 
> If anyone can think of a compelling reason the developers have not
> thought of, perhaps you will have luck convincing them. Random
> feature requests saying you want it probably don't qualify... at
> least explain why you are not able to simply run 'makepkg' in another
> user account.
> 
> I do have to wonder, though, why... one is running as root by
> default??? Why else would '--asroot' be needed?

In the past I sometimes had no reason _not_ to run makepkg as root, when
I wanted to compile from ABS, located in /var/abs/. I'm aware about the
drawback, that actually isn't relevant for my kind of computer usage +
several available backups. However, indeed, for my needs non-root 100%
does do the job too. No, I won't copy from ABS to some user dir, I
simply will chown or chmod in a way the big teachers won't us to act
self-responsible (I simply ignored the kindergarten flame-war like
posts). JFTR my machine isn't a server or a terrorist top secret
whatsoever machine. It's a digital audio workstation and there are
several, individual, complete backups available for each month.

Resume: I can live without '--asroot', but I'm against dropping it,
just for backwards compatibility. Imagine that somebody wrote a script
or whatever, that needs '--asroot'.

IMOH it isn't wise to ignore backwards compatibility. And btw. I
dislike the claims mentioned by a link ...
"Linux has never been about ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’ and those myths
should just die out." ... underpinned with a link to redhat :(. IMHO
Johannes Löthberg is completely wrong, likely a maintainer for the
wrong distro.