[lug] group perm nightmare

[chris]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 08:26:32AM -0600, Jason W. Strnad wrote:
 
> So I know that this is the 'RedHat' way and when in Rome (RedHat?) do 
> as the Romans, etc.  But, beyond the benefit of being consistent with 
> the distribution, can anyone tell me the benefit to this user:group 
> arrangement?

redhat claims that coupled with a default umask of 002, it makes multi-
user development environments easier to maintain without constant sysadmin
intervention or accidental privatizing of shared files:
	http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/ref-guide/s1-users-groups-private-groups.html

while their rationale makes sense, i'm not sure it's as widely applicable
as they might think.  most of the development i've been a part of has
been fairly single-userrific thanks to cvs (ie i own my own local copy of
all files in the project, and nobody else is trying to access them directly,
going rather thru the shared/sanely-perm'd cvs respository).

the sgid-directory trick is pretty neat, tho, however kinda useless if one's
umask is 022 or worse, which is (according to those docs) the whole point.

for me, this "user private group" scheme has created more trouble than it
is worth.  there have been several incidents of sendmail refusing to use
.forwards due to group writable directories/files, which is easy enough to
solve, but for junior sysadmins, a bit of a hassle to find information on
(in my experience, anyway.  you only have to show them the maillog once,
though, assuming you have debugging output set reasonably).


> Personally, and I come from a BSD background, I find this to be 
> somewhat obnoxious, and something that I work around, rather than 
> something I find useful.  I also hate the System-V init scripts that 
> RedHat brought to linux, but I have learned that they bring extra 
> flexibility in certain complicated startup situations.
 
while sysVinit took a little while to get used to (i came from a sunos 4/
slackware/aix background to redhat...) i don't think it's inherently much
worse.  just different.  this is a gut feeling, i have no technical
arguments to back it up.


> I don't mean to start a religious war, and I find RedHat' s distro to 
> be quite good on the whole, but I can't escape the thought that this 
> user:group arrangement is simply gratuitously different.  Can anyone 
> shed light on this for me?

i'm a redhat escapee (tho i like most any linux distro better than most
any other commercial unix), so take my opinion with a grain of salt.  i
still have to support it, and many are the days i find something
i think to be gratuitous or poorly planned, leaving me fuming with RedHate..
then again, i doubt i could do much better.  rpm, while introducing some
serious pain into my life, is also a helluva step up from those slackware
.tgz's i used to use...