Permissions, the group "root", emerge as non root

[schmeggahead]

OK, no matter how long I look at gentoo, I still feel like a beginner.

For instance, I just found the Documentation section in the kernel directory - so now some of that wizardry of the how to documentation was obtained.

But I digress, so here's what feels like a couple of newbie questions:

What is a good use of the group "root"?

What can I do with emerge when I am not root?

I spend a great deal of time installing and tweaking my systems which puts me into root more often. Can I do some of this tweaking without being root?

and if there is a doc source or category that covers this, please enlighten the unenlightened.

Thanks

[Sadako]

I've never seen the root group used before, and can't really think of any good use for it.
The way I see it, all files on your system must belong to both a user and a group, so it's best to just make all the system files belong to the "root" group, which no user is actually a member of.

If you're a member of the portage group you can use emerge with --pretend and --search, basically anything which doesn't involve altering anything on the system (ie essentially operating portage in "read only").

There is a reason you need to be root to alter system settings, and if a non-root user can alter anything system wide then something is wrong...

Not sure how relevant it is to what you're asking, but if you add "userfetch usersandbox userpriv" to the FEATURES variable within make.conf, then a lot of the work done by portage is done without root privileges.
Check `emerge --info`, some of them may already be set by default.
_________________
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[lightvhawk0]

vim .bashrc

[bunder]

Moved from Off the Wall to Networking & Security.
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[schmeggahead]

Thanks all for the tips.

I am starting to create an infrastructure to capture the information about each of the machines I bring up on gentoo and it falls into place to use a regular user to capture that information and use it to update the system using the alias for emerge. I also thought to help with convenience, I would create an alias for nanoo as sudo nano to help with editing control files.

Will report back with further infrastructure details.

[Slippery Jim]

This might be related a related topic. I've been messing with the ROOT environment variable, to install experimental gentoo trees into a subdirectory of my home directory. So far, I've been doing this as root, because portage won't let me install as a regular user. Since I own my home directory, it seems like I should be able to tell portage to let me do it, but I've never been able to figure out how. make.conf has a FEATURES variable called fakeroot that is supposed to affect the ebuild command, but I can't find anything else that documents it, and it doesn't seem to make a difference to emerge. Any thoughts?