Re: tar --no-same-owner (design bug)

[Clifford Wolf]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Bob Proulx wrote:

> > when extracting a tar file as root user, the tar program is behaving like
> > --same-owner has been specified. (which is a standard I assume?)
> >
> > This behavior is what the user usually wants when using 'tar' for
> > backups. But it's not what the user wants when extracting a package
> > source archive.
>
> It sounds like you are running build processes as the root user?
> Generally speaking I might suggest that you avoid running processes
> such as those as root.  It is usually safer to run those as a
> non-privileged user.  That way errors in development makefiles and the
> like can't harm the operating system.

I'm the maintainer project leader of ROCK Linux (www.rocklinux.org) a
gnu/linux distribution built kit. The ROCK Linux build must run as root
since we need stuff like chroot(). Sure - it would be possible to run
parts of the build as non-privelidged user, but that doesn't make much
sense in our case.

btw: "make install" needs to be executed as root in most cases. So errors
in development makefiles and the like can harm the operating system
anyways. In a ROCK Linux standard configuration I'm building more than 500
packages as root without any troubles. If there would be any problems in a
makefile which actually could destroy anything, it's very likely to be in
the command-tree for "make install" ..

yours,
 - clifford

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