Re: Recommended practise for installing files with specific owners/groups

[Ton Voon]

Hi,

On 11 Mar 2007, at 00:51, Ton Voon wrote:

> I work on the Nagios Plugins project and would like to install our  
> executables with a specific user and/or group. Looking through the  
> autoconf and automake manuals, I cannot see any recommended  
> information on the best way to achieve this. We used to be able to  
> do this with AM_INSTALL_PROGRAM_FLAGS = -o $user -g $group, but  
> this is not documented and doesn't appear to work anymore (I think  
> since we included libtool in our build suite).
>
> What is current best practise? As some shell commands within  
> install-exec-hook?

I had a reply from Bob Friesenhahn who suggested using install-hook  
to execute the chmod and chown commands. This would have involved a  
for loop to iterate through the list of executables, which seemed a  
bit complex.

My solution in the end was to override the INSTALL variable in  
configure.in. I set:

INSTALL="$INSTALL -o nagios -g nagios -m 0550"
INSTALL_STRIP_PROGRAM="$INSTALL_STRIP_PROGRAM -o nagios -g nagios -m  
0550"

This then installs with the desired user, group and mode. I realise  
there is a dependency on the install program supporting these  
options, but I couldn't see how to overcome this.

> I'd be happy to contribute some documentation to add to your online  
> manuals when this is answered.

If this is a good solution, would you like this added to the autoconf  
documentation? If so, which file should I patch against?

Ton

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