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Comment by roger_ | Hacker News Reader

Does installation still require root and a dedicated user account on Linux?

That really put me off.

See the release notes: we now have experimental support for using any prefix shorter than the Linux default. We are aiming to eventually fully support (Tier 1) any prefix under 64 bytes long.

Wait what? Why prefix length limits? Linux paths can be 4096 bytes long, I can't imagine y'all are hitting that?

Pouring a bottle requires rewriting paths embedded in binaries, which results in a cap.

Postgres is an example of this: the various directories are set at build time.

I’d imagine they’re live updating the library paths in the binary headers, so anything shorter or equal to what they’re using is a simple rewrite, but longer is more complex.

Ah. That makes sense.

It's so annoying how deeply UNIX packaging philosophy assumes that installation directories are something you hard-code at build time.

The present is built mostly on layers of the long-past :)

It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.

Yea, my understanding is that the split between / and /usr used to be more or less: the drive they used for / ran out of space, so they mounted another drive as /usr. As a consequence, / became where you put stuff that was essential during early boot, while /usr was where you put everything else.

But these days, "early boot" is handled by initramfs and we've all got drives large enough to not need the split anyway.

It was also useful for many machines to share a single /usr over NFS

The dedicated user isn't really required; it just expects that /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew exists. That can just be a symlink to your home directory. But yes, creating that symlink requires root on most systems. Brew itself doesn't require root or that pathname; you can put packages anywhere, but then many will have to be built from scratch since the pre-built packages don't work. And you need bubblewrap installed (which requires root) to use the sandbox, but again that is optional.

All that said, when you are running without a sandbox installing to a nonstandard location, not everything works consistently. I run this mode all the time. But it has been getting better.

Bubblewrap is history starting with 7.0.0 according to the release notes

I always download the install script and change the directory to my user home directory, ~/.brew

Does that break anything? Surprised it’s not the default.

The dedicated user account is optional.

It uses root once to chown its prefix directory /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew

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