Joey uses propellor to popular his /home/joey on hosts he controls. I'd like to use it to populate my home directory on hosts where I don't have root. If someone gives me a shell account on a Debian box, it would be great to just run propellor --spin to have apply properties such as having certain stuff downloaded and compiled in ~/local/bin, putting cronjobs in place, and checking stuff out with myrepos.
Does propellor assume root access at a deep enough level that writing properties to do this stuff would be impractical?
I think that the root assumptions are in basically 3 places:
Many Properties assume they're run as root, and will fail if they're not. Probably not a problem in practice for most of them. It might be nice to make a few, such as
User.hasSomePasswordwork when run as a normal user.Propellor's self-deployment involves running apt-get to instal ghc, etc. This could be modified to check if it's not root and do a local user of ghc if necessary.
localdir = "/usr/local" and this is used in various places by eg,--spin. It is, however, entirely possible to run "./propellor" in some other directory, which causes it to run in that directory and ensure the properties of localhost.--spincould certianly be taught to run in a user mode where it uses "~/.propellor/" instead oflocaldir`.I think that's all! I don't plan to try to add this feature myself, but will be happy to support anyone who wants to work on it.