On 11/24/07, Michael Thon <mike.thon@gmail.com> wrote:
Linux people generally recommend that you do not compile source code with a user that has superuser privileges, which I assume is a guard against possibly malicious commands that may be in the compile scripts. When I install packages with macports (sudo port install xyz) they're compiled by the root user. I assume that the developers have thought about this and decided that it is not a security problem. But I am curious, is it ok or not ok to compile source code as root? cheers
you can compile as any user, so long as you have permissions to write to where you're doing it. It's the installation step that might require root. This, I suspect, is part of the reason why MacPorts uses the /opt/local sandbox and doesn't write to the other parts of the system. -- Paul Beard / www.paulbeard.org/ <paulbeard@gmail.com/paulbeard@mac.com>