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.