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by jbg_ 3086 days ago
I've known plenty of developers whose automatic response to `packagemanager install packagename` failing is `sudo packagemanager install packagename`.
1 comments

I sincerely hope all modern package managers, when invoked with sudo, immediately spawn a very-low-privilege process that does most of the work sandboxed to /tmp/whatnot, and the root process just copies files to the right place and runs some system calls to update databases etc.
Most package managers I know support Turing complete install hooks. How would a package manager detect what parts of those require/are safe to run with root?