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I'd like to set the permissions of /usr/local/texlive so that I don't need admin rights to update my distribution with TeX Live Manager (or tlmgr), and so on. What's the best way to do this? Are there any caveats I need to be aware of?

Kent, below, asks why I want to do this. Having started to use homebrew, their philosophy is that you don't need admin rights to install user Applications and therefore you shouldn't need them to install CLI programs. (Everything they install goes through a branch of /usr/local that has group (I think) ownership to allow this.) So ever since, requiring sudo before tlmgr update (and so on) has felt like a needless imposition.

Can you give a reason TeX Live should require only admin rights to change itself?

Glorfindel
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Will Robertson
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  • I tend to think that one of the flaws in Mac OS X is precisely that you don't need to give the Admin password to alter Applications: easy to make a mistake! – Joseph Wright Oct 04 '10 at 05:55
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    @Joseph: on the contrary — I don't want someone's bad installer code to have write access to my whole machine! (I mean philosophically and in general; I've never had any problem with any TeX related installation.) – Will Robertson Oct 04 '10 at 08:27
  • You've obviously not managed to delete all of your applications by accident from the Terminal! – Joseph Wright Oct 04 '10 at 10:37
  • Ha! :) The other side of the coin. – Will Robertson Oct 04 '10 at 11:33
  • @Joseph: And with TimeMachine backups that is a problem... wait, what's the problem again? – Sharpie Oct 04 '10 at 18:45
  • @Sharpie: not everybody can afford the server farm to store complete incremental backups of their disk. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 05 '10 at 11:30
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    @konrad: not sure if you're joking... Time Machine certainly doesn't require a server farm. It's a user-oriented backup system only. – Will Robertson Oct 05 '10 at 12:44
  • @Will: I wasn’t really joking. The server farm was an exaggeration, of course. But in principle, I found whole-disk backups to be impractical. I’ve trouble even keeping just my personal data (no videos, no music) backed up because I run out of disk space on my external hard drives. I can’t imagine the space required if I had opted to back up my whole disk. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 05 '10 at 14:01
  • @konrad: Backing up your whole disk isn't recommended. Things like documents, photos and videos should probably be synced to storage like Dropbox, S3, GitHub, etc. But for tracking changes to your base system-- a cheap hard drive keeps me covered with 2 years which is a ridiculous amount of history. Do something bad to /usr or /Applications? Not a problem. – Sharpie Oct 05 '10 at 17:37

1 Answers1

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I read somewhere that one should change the owner of the texlive directory so that it does not require admin rights. I've been doing this ever since.

$ sudo chown -R myuser:mygroup /usr/local/texlive

[Inline comment by Will: In Mac OS X, on my machine with username will, I used will:admin as values for myuser:mygroup.]

The only place this ever bites me, is that every time I install a new version of TeX Live, I ask it to put symlinks in /usr/local/{bin,share/man,share/info} and I don't run the installer as root. As a result, it fails to install the symlinks and I either have to do it by hand, or redo the install as root and then update ownership.

I have been doing this successfully on Linux and Mac OS X for several years now without any problems.

So to answer your specific question, no, I cannot give a reason TeX Live should require admin rights. That said, I can think of pretty good reasons not to allow anyone to overwrite binaries you use on a shared machine.

Will Robertson
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TH.
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  • Thank! Re. "not to allow anyone to overwrite binaries" — right, in a shared environment things are rather different. – Will Robertson Oct 04 '10 at 01:03
  • @Will Robertson: With the user name foo, I use foo:admin on OS X since only root is in the group wheel by default (I think). – TH. Oct 04 '10 at 07:02
  • A quick google seems to suggest that all Admin users are in the wheel account, but I don't really know for sure. – Will Robertson Oct 04 '10 at 08:29
  • @Will Robertson: Odd. I just checked 3 macs, and my admin user account is definitely not in the wheel group. Two of them were 10.5, and one was 10.6. This seems to imply that the same was true with 10.4. I don't recall what older versions of Mac OS X did. – TH. Oct 04 '10 at 08:48
  • Alright, I'm totally confused and I reckon you're right. I have no idea where I got that particular piece of misinformation; is there anything wrong with just sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local then? – Will Robertson Oct 04 '10 at 09:41
  • @Will Robertson: The only thing I can really think of that would be a problem on a single-user machine is malware being placed in /usr/local/bin without your knowledge. Generally, if that can be accomplished, then code could have been run in the first place so it's probably not that much less secure. I guess this is already true with letting /usr/local/texlive/year/bin/arch/ be writable. Might be a good question to ask on http://unix.stackexchange.com/ – TH. Oct 05 '10 at 18:06