Trouble installing other software from pipplware

[robmcc83]

Hi all,
First off I use a raspberry pi 3b with retropie offical image and fully updated genuine raspberry psu.

I've just installed transmission on my setup and it appears to have installed it from the pipplware repo as I have this due to having kodi installed.

It doesn't configure like it normally does installing transmission from a fresh raspian lite image, but I have got around this after a little messing around with config files.

What I have found is as standard transmission installs under user debian-transmission and I know how to set all that up and edit config files to my liking.

But installing on a retropie image that has the pipplware repo due to kodi being installed behaves completely differently, for example, the usual config file I normally edit has no effect on the settings within transmission but editing /home/pi/.config/transmission/settings did solve this.
So this got me looking further into this and it appears that transmission runs under user pi.

Now every transmission tutorial advises against this for security reasons.

So my 2 questions are, is this safe and secondly if or more recent version became available on the raspian stretch repo and it updated, would in face problems with the config files not working.

Thanks
Rob

[Rascas]

@robmcc83 The only diference from the transmission available on raspbian and pipplware, is that the pipplware one is already pré-configured with sane/common defaults and it runs with user "Pi" to avoid disk user permissions configuration, if you want and configure an usb disk mount point as a download location. It is a kind off "just install and go package".
About your questions:
1- Security issues is relative. If you are really concerned about security, you probably shouldn't be using torrents in the first place.

2- About the config, like most linux programs, transmission has a global config file (for every user) in some place like /etc/transmission... (don't remember at the moment) and a user config file which stays somewhere in /home/$user/.... If a user config file exists, it takes precedence over the global config file.

The Raspbian unmodified is still available, it is just that the pipplware one has a higher release number. If you want, you can "downgrade" and install it with apt for example.