Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [Fwd: Re: Gentoo Rules]

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

On Saturday 15 December 2007, Randy Barlow wrote:

> Yeah, that's the kinds of differences of opinion that are in the bug
> report, which is part of what makes this a more difficult ebuild to
> write.  Things like libraries are really easy because it's just a
> configure make make install, but here you have a lot of configuration
> files and differences of opinion.  I was thinking that a USE variable
> could be in order here, to support suid and a separate apache
> instance. Perhaps the variable could be suid?

First, my opinion is that BackupPC, while being a wonderful application, 
should be split in two parts (by upstream): the daemon, and the web 
interface, so that they don't have to run on the same machine. Last time 
I checked, this was not supported, even if the config file seemed to 
allow for such a config. If this was the architecture, then it could be 
split into two distinct ebuilds, like eg zabbix or other apps.

That said, and things being the way they are now, I'd make the suid 
behavior the default, since it requires less changes in a running system 
(a perl reemerge at most - assuming of course apache is already 
installed). If the user wants the separate apache instance, then he can 
set, say, USE=private-apache to get it. (btw, do gentoo initscripts 
support starting multiple instances of a daemon, perhaps under different 
users and using different parameters? I'd not bet on it, but I may be 
wrong. If it's not supported, waiting for baselayout to support this may 
take a long time, so it would be better to release the easier suid 
version in the meanwhile.)

But again, there might be better arguments for doing the opposite. I'll 
take a look at the b.g.o. page where the ebuild is discussed (last time 
I checked was long ago, and things have surely evolved by now).
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