Software installation opinions needed

[Stanley Friesen]

In article <650 at silence.princeton.nj.us> jay at silence.princeton.nj.us (Jay Plett) writes:
>Providing for installation by a naive user is indeed frustrating and
>difficult.  But that doesn't negate the fact that each of /etc/passwd,
>/etc/group, and /etc--on the machine where a software package is being
>installed--might be inaccessible to the software or otherwise have no
>relevance to it when it is executed. ...
>  Meanwhile, it's presumptuous and risky
>for a software provider to assume that (s)he can predict what steps are
>required to successfully add a user or group to a particular system (or
>that the system the software is being installed on is the system
>it will be executed on).

For a concrete example of this type of situation, consider our set-up here.
We have a (large) network of Sun workstations, with extensive NFS file
sharing.  We have set our system up so that the login & password information
is kept in a centralized database (called the Yellow Pages).  The result is
that any user with an account on one machine has one on all machines.  To
further support this illusion, all home directories are auto-mounted NFS
file systems.

OK, now an installation script will incorrectly update the local /etc/passwd
file instead of the Yellow Pages (which are probably mastered on a different
machine anyway).  Furthermore, root priveledges are not network transparent.
That is root on machine A does *not* have root priveledges on machine B.
This means that any attempt to update a system file that is actually on a
different machine will fail.  (And this is quite common, since we are
sharing things like /usr across all machines with the same architecture)

I do not see how any install 'script' that assumed standard, stand-alone
unix capabilities could possibly succedd in this environment.

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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanely Friesen)