Comment 88 for bug 213215

Cdrtools use an open development process. During the design of a new feature it is always possible to influence the implementation by making better proposals. This allows the best idea to win. The design of libsiconv happened in May 2007 and proposing to use $DEST_DIR/lib/share/siconv before the end of Summer 2007 did most likely have a 100% chance to get accepted.

Now the implementation exists since 3.5 years and it seems to be too late to modify a path that exists since a long time on various platforms. Since June 2010, there is cdrtools-3.00-final and this creates a need to maintain binary compatibility.

Regarding the need for suid root:

The permission of the files mentioned above has little influence on the behavior of cdrtools. There are other reasons that require root privileges. There have been some people that in the past tried to remove related error messages in the code. The result of such changes has been unspecific late abortions that make it impossible to debug the related problem.

In theory, Linux could be enhanced to permit a root-less installation of cdrtools. This root-less feature is possible on Solaris since at least year 2004 and since then, I am trying to get in contact with Linux distributions to add the needed features. Once a notable Linux distribution will add the needed userland support for fine-grained privileges as a non-deselectale part of the base system, I see nothing that prevents to create a root-less cdrtools installation for Linux as well. For now, there is no way to avoid suid-root for cdrtools on Linux.