[lug] group perm nightmare

[Jason W. Strnad]

Well that clears up what they intended.  I think, however, they've only  
accomplished being sufficiently different from everybody else to  
irritate me.  Thanks for the link, I had not seen that particular  
explanation before.

As for actually using RedHat, I usually suggest it to other people  
and/or install it for people when I think it will prevent my having to  
answer questions about how to do things RedHat takes care of.  I, on  
the other hand, use Slackware or Debian, when I use Linux, and couldn't  
be happier.

-jasons

On Sunday, October 6, 2002, at 03:47 PM, chris wrote:

> 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...
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