Re: [pavlik to poogimmal]

r coyne wrote:

>My point was precisely that installing software is
>*not* (necessarily) "a system-wide change" and that
>for the software itself to make it obligately so is
>neither necessary nor desirable.
>
>
Well, to Microsoft it is. They say that "Limited Users" may not be
allowed to install software, and if users need these privileges but not
full administrator ones, to set them as a "Power User".

And yes, installing to the C:\Program Files\ directory is system-wide -
Windows comes with default permissions on that which I cannot remember.
It may very well be that a regular user can write to it, I wouldn't be
suprised: in addition to administering networks, I also remove spyware
from residential computers. It seems to install and run just fine.

>The purpose of having limited users is to protect the
>rest of the system from buggy or malicious software
>(or users). An installation routine -- especially an
>exe program as opposed to a script that I could read
>-- can just as easily be buggy or malicious as the
>main program it installs, so in principle I see no
>difference between the two. In fact, not only is Abi
>(like all large programs) perpetually full of bugs, we
>have just been told that there aren't the time and
>resources to do the installation routine really
>carefully and correctly; so why stake the whole system
>on its being perfect enough to be safe to run as
>Administrator?
>
>
Why stake any program? Asking inflammatory questions like this will not
get you any answer which pleases you. On Slashdot, they'd call it
trolling, but I'll be more helpful. If you want to, I have the entire
list of instructions, step by step, that I follow to build every 2.3.x
release starting with 2.3.4 and that will be used for the release builds
of 2.4. Almost 11000 people have downloaded my 2.3.4 build this month
to date. If there was something wrong with it, you bet we'd hear about
it. Our development process is open - that's what
bugzilla.abisource.com is for.

If you really are paranoid enough that you don't want anything
potentially malicious running on your Windows machine, the instructions
are at http://www.abisource.com/~rp/index.htm . Yes, that ~rp is me.
Please prove my hope that you are not just trolling. If you find any
bugs in that routine, please report them, since I'll be using that to
build 2.4, a stable release which will have much wider distribution than
2.3.4.

>Sure, there are programs that really must be installed
>administratively but can then be run by ordinary
>users; what I said was that a word processor isn't one
>of those. And yes, after thorough testing and
>confidence, one might want to reinstall as
>administrator to promote a piece of software to
>system-wide status; but for maximal safety the initial
>installation should be done, if possible, as a limited
>user, and there is nothing desirable about making this
>unnecessarily impossible.
>
>
It's not unnecessarily impossible - in fact it may work just fine, I
don't know. If it does, more power to you, I was simply trying to
troubleshoot, and this was a first step. It _will_ work as
administrator, it _may not_ as limited user (it's not recommended in
Windows, actually, to do a first install as limited, it tends to foul
things up. It's not *nix where you just install to a different prefix,
say, in your home folder.)

A lot of the fuss about "thorough testing and confidence" is generally
just used to lambaste a particular target. If you want to read all
countless lines of code in AbiWord, keep the standard up and read it for
every application you use. And the system you use it on. Be reasonable
- nobody does that. It's a word processor - it doesn't even access the
internet unless you install a plugin or choose Check for Updates, then
it loads an HTML page in your default browser.

>I wonder: Is it really necessary to have a "patch" to
>the installation routine, or is the business simple
>enough that one could simply have documentation, in
>natural language, about how to install by hand?
>
>

It's not hard to do it yourself, if you can follow the steps above. If
you really want to, you can copy the c:\program files\abisource2
directory from another machine - it ought to work. The installer is
because we want to make sure that it works, and so that users can
install it in the easiest fashion.

>
>
>--- abiryan@ryand.net wrote:
>
>
>
>>Actually, you are confusing two different issues
>>here. Running the word
>>processor doesn't require administrator priveleges,
>>as expected.
>>Installation (a system-wide change), however, does
>>require
>>administrator privileges, and this is desired (and
>>necessary). One
>>doesn't want a limited user installing programs,
>>this is in fact often
>>the reason that limited users are set up in Windows.
>> If limited users
>>aren't restricted from installing software, which is
>>a major
>>system-administration action, what use is the
>>designation of limited
>>user?
>>
>>AbiWord does work in such a situation, where the
>>software is installed
>>by the system administrator, and used by any number
>>of limited users.
>>I know, I use it this way on several Windows 2000
>>machines
>>
>>
>>

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Received on Thu Aug 18 07:00:31 2005