How to make mixed owner installations

Although in the unix tradition, software is usually installed as root, this is often very undersirable, particularly for grid or distributed computing situations. On the other hand, software occasionally really does have to be installed as root. If you have a large software environment that has a small root requiring part, there are a couple of mechanisms in Pacman that are meant to help with this:

• You can use cu to change username only during the parts of the installation where this is really necessary. You can, for example, do

  cu('root'); package('RootRequiringPackage'); cu()
  

  to "change username" just for the installation of RootRequiringPackage. The advantage of this is that updates of the overall environment can be performed by a non-root user unless the root requiring package itself changes.

• You can ask your system administrator to make a Pacman installation containing the root requiring packages and then use this installation as a cache.

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