[cups] installing and running CUPS as an unprivileged user

[Matthias Apitz]

Hello,

The background of my question is, that our IT department does not want
to give us (the development team) root or sudo access to our development
SuSE Linux servers anymore. 

That's why we are undertaking currently an investigation how
our Library Management System could be developed, deployed (also to customers)
and started as an ordinary user (once the DBS PostgreSQL is started as root).

There are still some open questions in our own software, but one mayor issue is
CUPS itself. We are compiling CUPS from source with a destination directory
which can be owned by an ordinary user, so in principle the deployment
could be done that way. Ofc currently some files are set to be owned by
root:lp and some dirs / spooling areas have special perms as well. Also the
standard LISTEN port 631 could also only created by root.

My question here to the group is: was such changes for CUPS already
investigated and changes undertaken by CUPS implementers? Is it worth to
follow such path or should we better say to IT: for CUPS no way (as for
PostgreSQL or Sybase DBS).

Thanks in advance for any comments or pointers.

	matthias (CUPS user since ages)
-- 
Matthias Apitz, ✉ guru at unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ +49-176-38902045
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