--- rxvt-unicode/README.FAQ 2006/01/02 15:11:05 1.21 +++ rxvt-unicode/README.FAQ 2006/01/09 01:54:43 1.22 @@ -103,6 +103,47 @@ also a bug in the Debian version and it serves as a reminder for other users that might encounter the same issue. + I am maintaining rxvt-unicode for distribution/OS XXX, any + recommendation? + You should build one binary with the default options. configure now + enables most useful options, and the trend goes to making them + runtime-switchable, too, so there is usually no drawback to enbaling + them, except higher disk and possibly memory usage. The perl + interpreter should be enabled, as important functionality (menus, + selection, likely more in the future) depends on it. + + You should not overwrite the "perl-ext-common" snd "perl-ext" + resources system-wide (except maybe with "defaults"). This will + result in useful behaviour. If your distribution aims at low memory, + add an empty "perl-ext-common" resource to the app-defaults file. + This will keep the perl interpreter disabled until the user enables + it. + + If you can/want build more binaries, I recommend building a minimal + one with "--disable-everything" (very useful) and a maximal one with + "--enable-everything" (less useful, it will be very big due to a lot + of encodings built-in that increase download times and are rarely + used). + + I need to make it setuid/setgid to support utmp/ptys on my OS, is this + safe? + Likely not. While I honestly try to make it secure, and am probably + not bad at it, I think it is simply unreasonable to expect all of + freetype + fontconfig + xft + xlib + ... + rxvt-unicode itself to + all be secure. Also, rxvt-unicode disables some options when it + detects that it runs setuid or setgid, which is not nice. + + Elevated privileges are only required for utmp and pty operations on + some systems (for example, GNU/Linux doesn't need any extra + privileges for ptys, but some need it for utmp support). If + rxvt-unicode doesn't support the library/setuid helper that your OS + needs I'll be happy to assist you in implementing support for it. + + So, while setuid/setgid operation is supported and not a problem on + your typical single-user-no-other-logins unix desktop, always + remember that its an awful lot of code, most of which isn't checked + for security issues regularly. + When I log-in to another system it tells me about missing terminfo data? The terminal description used by rxvt-unicode is not as widely available as that for xterm, or even rxvt (for which the same