Permissions for gnc-fq-update

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 15, 2018, at 8:07 PM, David T. via gnucash-devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> In my quixotic quest to try and get quote retrieval working again on my Mac, I’ve been looking at ways to remove and reload all the Perl underlying Finance::Quote. (As John noted to me recently, there isn’t any uninstall command in CPAN, unfortunately). In this process, I ran into numerous discussions online that strongly recommend *against* invoking CPAN with root privileges for reasons I don’t quite understand [beyond the generic ‘don’t run things as root’], and with solutions I also don’t quite understand. My level of understanding notwithstanding, the advice is unambiguous.
> 
> In the course of this process, I opened up gnc-fq-update, and see immediately that it wants CPAN run with root access. Is this necessary? Given what I’ve read online, is this advised?
> 
> I ask out of curiousity, and to learn more.

Dave,

The alternative to running cpan as root is to set up an alternative location for it to install to and configure perl’s environment (the perl system variable of interest is @INC)  to include that location when it searches for modules.

It’s the FinanceQuote Update.app that runs gnc-fq-update as root. gnc-fq-update itself is a very simple perl program with no inbuilt privilege escalation.

Regards,
John Ralls