[wplug] Academic Linux Support Issues

[Cameron McBride]

Hey Matt,

If the faculty are willing to change permissions, they can do this now
by providing a directory from their $HOME that students can use via
ENV variables.

If you want to be more official, I'd say throw it into /opt or the
like.  I'd be hesitant to give them access that appears as /usr/local,
since it is searched by default for other unsuspecting users.  So, my
suggestion would be one of:
  /opt/faculty_name/...
  /opt/course_identifier/...

You can tailor the /opt to something that is NFS mounted or whatever
is convenient given your setup.  They can instruct their students /
users to modify LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. to point to these.

This isn't a security compromise per se, as it doesn't do anything to
the other default users and is basically just another $HOME that the
faculty can write to.

We do something like this for our research group and libs that we want
to maintain by source.

Cameron