portmanager core dumps

[Michael C. Shultz]

F. Even - fbsd-questions wrote:
>> On Sunday 08 January 2006 18:30, Robert Marella wrote:
>>> Good Afternoon
>>>
>>> At times when in a hurry or not thinking as fast as my fingers, I try
>>> to run "portupgrade -s | grep OLD" from a regular user account instead
>>> of "sudo portupgrade -s | grep OLD".
>>
>> do you mean "portmanager -s | grep OLD" by any chance?
>>>
>>> I would expect portupgrade to insult my intelligence and question my
>>> heritage .... or is that question my intelligence and insult my
>>> heritage. Well, it doesn't do either. It core dumps. This will happen
>>> on more than one system running 6 Stable and the updated portmanager.
>>>
>>> [robert at frankie] ~> pkg_info | grep portmanager
>>> portmanager-0.4.1_4 FreeBSD installed ports status and safe update
>>> utility
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Robert
>>
>> Portmanager will only run as root, I'll make a note/bug to check 
>> error handling when someone attempts to run it as a normal user.
>
> Mike,
>
> Please don't disable the ability to run this as a non-root user.  I've 
> managed to get it to run by chowning it's config, files under /var/db 
> and the entire ports collection to an update user.  Now I can run 
> portmanager -s and it will give me an accurate run-down of what 
> upgrades are needed.  I can also then download updates as a restricted 
> user. Changing to root will allow me to update as I need to, and as 
> long as the src is cleaned up, no files owned by root are left behind 
> in the ports tree.  This actually works quite nicely.
>
> Thanks,
> Frank

For the next few months I have no access to a FreeBSD system so won't be 
changing anything.  Portmanager has no internal mechanisms for checking 
ownership, I think
that so long as whoever has write access to everything in 
/usr/local/share/portmanager should be able to run it no problem.  So if 
you want to change who can run it besides
root just change the permisions of the files in that directory.   I do 
have a change at home that moves the data bases to /var/db/portmanager 
so if that ever gets posted things
will change slightly, it may never be posted though if no one takes over 
maintainership before I return.

-Mike