Timeline for Why don't package managers have per-user installations and registries?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 14, 2019 at 9:09 | history | edited | einpoklum | CC BY-SA 4.0 | added 4 characters in body |
| Dec 31, 2017 at 7:18 | comment | added | Joe | @einpoklum - You're right. I'm just saying that adding per user installs isn't "essential" because you can still do it the hard way if you have to. (I upvoted the question.) | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 9:30 | comment | added | einpoklum | @Joe: The whole point of package management systems is to avoid each person (sysadmin or user) from having to build things themselves and have to sort out the dependencies. | |
| Dec 30, 2017 at 7:07 | comment | added | Joe | Also, although it can be a real task, you can always build a package from source as a user and run it yourself. It gets convoluted with dependencies and pieces of packages which might expect to have root privileges. You also lose the pre-install/post-install scripts that integrate the package into places like the menu system. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 7:24 | review | Close votes | |||
| Dec 29, 2017 at 14:01 | |||||
| Dec 29, 2017 at 6:23 | comment | added | Bob | I've seen a few packages distributed via pip, npm and gopkg -- partially because they're distro-independent and partially because they generally allow user-specific installation. | |
| Dec 29, 2017 at 2:03 | comment | added | cas | In short: It's not the job of the system package manager to mess with user data. ~/bin, ~/lib, etc are, from the POV of the system, "user data". | |
| S Dec 28, 2017 at 23:35 | history | suggested | Jonas Stein | CC BY-SA 3.0 | fixed typo |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 22:50 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Dec 28, 2017 at 23:35 | |||||
| Dec 28, 2017 at 21:18 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackUnix/status/946490488420491264 | ||
| Dec 28, 2017 at 20:14 | comment | added | Thegs | @einpoklum Yep, I'm just spitballing here. Unless one of the developers drops by (it has happened before!) we're stuck with speculation. | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 20:01 | comment | added | einpoklum | @Thegs: I doubt that this was the consideration. Few software projects avoid significant features because of considerations such as "if people did this they would fill up their disk drive". If it were some kind of security risk, maybe. Also, on multi-user systems, there would be quotas; and few people would ever use this anyway. Plus this is all speculation... | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 19:21 | answer | added | jayhendren | timeline score: 15 | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 19:00 | comment | added | Thegs | Admittedly my knowledge on this isn't the greatest, but it could have been done to prevent users from filling up hard drives with the dependencies of the software they personally installed. If apt isn't run as root it can't update system libraries, so the user now has a newer version than the system does. Repeat for every user and older, smaller hard drives would have been filling up pretty fast. | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 18:43 | answer | added | Elshar | timeline score: 6 | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 18:04 | comment | added | Weijun Zhou | If it had been provided it would have saved much of my time compiling software from source on computers which I don't have superuser privilege. I am eager to know the answer. | |
| Dec 28, 2017 at 17:33 | history | asked | einpoklum | CC BY-SA 3.0 |