Permissions problem

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 21, 2008, at 17:16, Vince Rice wrote:

>> It's normal that everything is owned by root. You would use "sudo"  
>> before any port command
>> which modifies things, such as sync, selfupdate, upgrade, install,  
>> etc.
>
> Wow, that was fast!
>
> OK, I see that now. I did look in the docs before, but the examples  
> I saw were for non-modification items, i.e. list, etc., and there  
> was no sudo on the line. I took that to mean I didn't need it.  
> Going back and looking, I see that it's on the install and other  
> modifying lines.
>
> Sorry for the noise, and thanks very much for the insanely quick  
> response!

You're welcome :)

Most ports don't actually need to be installed as root (though the  
way MacPorts is set up on the .dmg installer package, they always  
are). You can, if you prefer, install MacPorts manually by building  
from source, and specify the --with-install-user and --with-install- 
group configure parameters to use a different user. I do this on my  
own installation. Occasionally a port will fail with a permissions  
error; in that case, you can issue your port install command again  
with sudo to fix it.

There was also a Google Summer of Code project this year to make  
MacPorts only use root when necessary:

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/gsoc08-privileges

I don't think we've released that yet though.