build ports from not a root user?

Mike Clarke jmc-freebsd2 at milibyte.co.uk
Fri Jul 22 09:28:32 UTC 2011


On Thursday 21 July 2011, Peter Vereshagin wrote:

> As long as I saw the instructions on building from source they wre
> generally all like this:
>
>     $ cd /tarball-expanded-0.x.y
>     $ ./configure
>     $ make
>     $ su -
>     # cd /tarball-expanded-0.x.y
>     # make install
>
> That important 'su -' is omitted from the ports. And it is about the
> security.

But this requires /usr/ports to be writable by the non-root user and 
creates a security risk. This cannot be overcome by limiting the 
installation to root only because you can no longer be sure that the 
source or installation scripts have not been tampered with by a 
non-privileged user.

-- 
Mike Clarke


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