[tex-live] gpg with tlmgr with tl 2016 pretest, etc, on a Mac

[Zdenek Wagner]

2016-04-29 18:20 GMT+02:00 John Collins <jcc8 at psu.edu>:

> At various points in this discussion, it has been mentioned that on linux
> it is recommend to install TeXLive as a normal user.  What are the reasons
> for this?  In the installation instructions
> https://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html the recommendation is
> merely stated, but no justification is given.  Why should this be different
> between linux and OS-X?
>

There may be no difference for quite a lot of users but remember that you
may need to add additional (probably nonfree) files to texmf-local. If
texmf-local is owned by you, you can do it but you cannot run mktexlsr
bechase during installation the ls-R files were created by root and are
thus owned by root. As a developer of packages I have a few more TEXMF
trees added. Years ago when my TL was installed and updated by root it
happened to me several files, that ownership of ls-R files was changed to
root, I did not noticed that mkteclsr reported a permission error and it
took me some time to figure out why the new files are not found.

I really hate the concept of sudo, it may be quite dangerous. Assume you
leave a computer for a moment and forget to lock it. At that time anybody
may come and use sudo to do a harmful action. Such a person can do it
without knowing the root password. And if a malicious code can be invoked
via internet (abusing vulnerability in some software), sudo gives root
permissions to an attacker who does not need to know the root password, so
the malicious code running as a normal user can get root permissions it
that user is allowed to use sudo.

>
> A quick Google search did not show an obvious place to find this
> information.
>
> John Collins
>
>

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
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