anselmo-ed@CS.YALE.EDU (Ed Anselmo) (02/28/91)
"...the administraters never have the time to install it"
"I'd install them myself, but undergrads aren't allowed root access."
Long ago, the CS Facility realized that you can't support everything.
You can't reasonably be expected to support rn, and vnews and trn and
xrn and gnus and gnews and Mail and MUSH and ELM and MH. They picked
a set of supported utilites: in the case of mail user agents it was
Berkeley Mail,emacs RMAIL, MH/xmh, and az (homegrown), for news
readers, it was rrn, gnus, and xrn. Supported software goes in the
/usr/local tree.
Users who want to contribute software can place it in the /usr/yale
tree. And when someone complains about software in the /usr/yale tree,
we can point them to whomever installed it. We're nice guys, and
we'll do things like compile emacs with a default load-path which
includes the appropriate directories in /usr/yale as well as in
/usr/local. No muss, no fuss.
Basically, nobody gets root access except facility members. One
trashed disk configuration by a well-meaning undergrad/grad
student/faculty member can wreck your whole day. Your basic setuid
root program gives members of the "wizard" group the abililty to
reboot the machine, kill processes, manage printer queues, renice
jobs, etc.
--
Ed Anselmo anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-ed