Use of Root

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Gordon Marx writes:
| On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 08:14:09 -0500, Jerry Feldman <gerald.feldman at hp.com> wrote:
| > Does the business want its programmers to spend time installing and maintaining >software?
|
| Bzzt! You don't need root privileges for that... configure
| --prefix=/home/$USER works great. :--)
|
| It's what I do at work, because they expect me to work with Vim
| 5.something and no LaTeX, which I couldn't handle.

Yeah; I've worked in places that did that.   Invariably,  I
then  had  to  deal with the bug reports from customers for
whom the install scripts bombed  with  "Permission  denied"
messages.  When the inevitable finger pointing settled down
I'd just say that I hadn't tested those  cases,  because  I
wasn't permitted to test them.

This doesn't always happen, of course.  But it seems fairly
obvious  that if you don't allow your programmers to test a
particular case, there's a good chance that that case  will
fail in a production environment.

When working in your own directories, you  don't  have  any
permission  problems.   But  install  scripts often need to
write into a protected system directory,  and  getting  the
permissions right in that case can be tricky.  This is part
of the reason that programmers usually have separate "crash
and  burn" machines where they can do anything they need to
do without oversight from the IT staff.