116669 - Release notes should better describe multi-user installation process

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Documentation Graveyard :: Help Viewer, defect)

Description

[timeless]

spun off from bug 41057

Comment 1

[Kari Hurtta]

Actually README text's Installation Instructions -- Unix
should be completely rewritten. 

Something like that:

    Installation Instructions -- Unix

         * Change to the mozilla-installer directory (ie. to this directory) 
           and run the installer with the ./mozilla-installer command.
         * Follow the instructions in the install wizard for installing 
           Mozilla.
         * To install multi-user environment run mozilla-installer
           as root. 
         * If installation directory (default: /usr/local/mozilla) exists,
           mozilla-installer erases that before installing new mozilla
           to that directory.
         * After installation mozilla-installer automatically starts
           mozilla. That does required post-installation tasks.

On that point when README file is available, user is already extracted
*.tar.gz file, so there is no need instructions for that.
  

Comment 2

[Syd Logan]

--> steve

Comment 3

[rudman]

-->jatin. Copying endico. I thought there was some other bug that raised this
issue (not 41057?) that jatin and endico had input on.

Comment 4

[Jatin Billimoria]

Syd, do you agree with Kari's comments? I thought the multi-user installation
issue was resolved with Bug 41057, as Steve noted.

Comment 5

[timeless]

cc syd to get an answer to jatin's question.

Comment 6

[Syd Logan]

The changes here look fine to me. The reason you need to be root in a multi-user
environment is that in order to be accessible to multiple users, the binary
needs to be in one of the directories that is searched by a default system path
for that user, and in many cases, that path includes /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin
(we default to the later, which is appropriate for software not installed as a
part of the normal OS distribution). In the case of /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin,
you need to be root to install there. 

Now, strictly speaking, an admin could install the software *anywhere* to
acheive a multi-user install, as long as the administrator takes the required
steps to ensure that the binary is locatable from the command line by other
users. This can be achieved in several ways: augmenting the users' search path
by augmenting the PATH variable in their login profile to include the directory
into which the product was installed, modifying the default search path, setting
up a mozilla or netscape alias in the users' default shell environment (a csh
function named mozilla, for example, that invokes the real mozilla app),
providing symlinks in a standard place to point to the installed location, or
creating a script called mozilla or netscape that changes to the installed dir
and then runs ./mozilla or ./netscape from there, placing that script in a
standard location.  

Still, the way we are doing the install is the probably the best way, if not the
most common solution. If installing as root to a standard place doesn't work for
a given situation, a reasonably skill unix system admininstrator will use one of
the techniques I mentioned above, or something similar, to deal with their
specific situation.

Our installer defaults to /usr/local/bin since that is what makes sense for
Linux. It may not be the best solution for HP-UX or some other Unix variant --
it may be that we could augment the mozilla build flags to accept some argument
that allows a platform to set it to something more appropriate for that OS.  

Comment 7

[Jatin Billimoria]

Reassigning to Asa Dotzler <[e-mail]>, who is accepting bugs on Mozilla
readme

Comment 8

[Vedran Miletic]

retargeting

Comment 9

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Please do not change the milestone field unless you own the bug. Thanks.

Comment 10

[Daniel Wang]

can we move this to mozilla.org or documentation product so doc contributors can
better track this?

Comment 11

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

This bug has been buried in the graveyard and has not been updated in over 5 years. It is probably safe to assume that it will never be fixed, so resolving as WONTFIX.

[Mass-change filter: graveyard-wontfix-2014-09-24]