[racket-dev] sudo make install

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 3 12:39:28 EST 2011

I've changed the handin server so it puts its docs in the main tree
like (I believe) it is supposed to.

But earlier the messages led me to believe that something was setting
a preference. Can you try that again with the latest and see if you
get a preferences file (or any other files for that matter)?

Thanks,
Robby

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Jon Rafkind <rafkind at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> I reproduced this. 'make install' was killed due to a memory shortage
> but before it died it wrote out .racket. This happened somewhere while
> the scribble files were being processed.
>
> $ find .racket
> .racket
> .racket/5.0.99.6
> .racket/5.0.99.6/doc
> .racket/5.0.99.6/doc/handin-server
> .racket/5.0.99.6/doc/handin-server/in.sxref
> .racket/5.0.99.6/doc/handin-server/stamp.sxref
> .racket/5.0.99.6/doc/handin-server/out.sxref
>
> On 12/31/2010 02:44 PM, Jon Rafkind wrote:
>> Well I'm not sure when he will pop into irc again but I'll try to
>> reproduce this scenario.
>>
>> On 12/31/2010 02:43 PM, Robby Findler wrote:
>>> Probably whatever is writing to the preferences file should not be doing that.
>>>
>>> If he could send along whatever is in the .racket/ directory (and
>>> owned by root) that would be useful.
>>>
>>> Robby
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:38 AM, Jon Rafkind <rafkind at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>>>> A user on IRC complained about an issue where after building and
>>>> installing racket (with 'sudo make install') he received the following
>>>> error upon starting drracket:
>>>>
>>>> Error saving preferences: open-output-file: cannot open output file:
>>>> "~/.racket/.LOCKracket-prefs.rktd" (Permission denied; errno=13)
>>>>
>>>> Apparently some part of the installation process writes to ~/.racket and
>>>> since he used 'sudo' it was with root privileges. Its worth noting that
>>>> if you use 'su -c make install' things work because 'su -c' changes
>>>> $HOME to /root whereas sudo does not.
>>>>
>>>> The user used 'sudo make install' because he passed
>>>> '--prefix=/usr/local' to configure and so expected things to install
>>>> there. I suppose this is a case of user error but its extremely subtle
>>>> so I wouldn't call it that.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe during installation ~/.racket shouldn't be used, and /tmp/racket
>>>> could be used instead or something?
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