gsoc08-privileges branch merged

[Paul Magrath]

Hey Josh,

If you have any questions, give me a shout. I'm still around I just  
haven't had much time - I'm in final year of my Computer Science  
course and workload is crazy.

> I just finished merging the changes from the gsoc08-privileges branch
> back into trunk. This of course has the potential for breakage,  
> though I
> changed the default back to running as root, so you should hopefully  
> not
> see any problems unless you pass --with-macports-user=you to  
> configure.
>
> The privilege dropping has its issues. For example, if you start port
> with sudo, the configure and build phases will be run as root. But  
> then
> root privileges will be dropped by the time it tries to clean after
> installing, with predictable results.

I was aware of this problem. The solution is to elevate privileges if  
clean fails, which I thought I'd written code to do so. However, as  
I'm sure you noticed, I haven't had time to keep the branch up to date  
so it is entirely possible that the code has been bypassed in the flow  
of control somehow.


> So there's still some tweaking to be done, but I figured the sooner it
> was merged, the less bitrot there'd be to deal with.

Agreed, thanks actually for going ahead. I had meant to get it merged  
into trunk at the end of the summer but with all the v1.7 release  
stuff and the change in port managers, it didn't really seem the best  
time to merge in a large amount of code. I amn't sure if you have  
seen: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/gsoc08-privileges , if not it  
might be worth a read.

Regards,

Paul.