Re: how can I tell what packages depend on group memebership?
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 03:33:28PM -0800, Nano Nano wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 11:08:01PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 12:22:12PM -0800, Nano Nano wrote:
> > > So is there a way to tell what behavior depends on being a member of
> > > what groups, by querying the package database or something?
> >
> > It's not really a package database thing.
>
> Thanks for the doc link.
>
> It would be useful if the package headers contained some encoded
> information about what group memeberships affect its behavior, like
> "depends-on", "suggests", &c. Then automated tools could do interesting
> things based on that info.
>
> If there is a formal process for integrating that data into a future
> version of the package format, I'd like to pursue and nominate that.
>
> Unless you can explain why it's a bad or unworkable idea.
It's probably not actually unworkable as such, but I'm not sure that
it's very useful. Anything that group membership affects is almost
always represented in the filesystem (I can't think of any
counterexamples offhand, apart from ones like sudo which you configure
yourself), so it seems to me that simply looking around with 'find
-group <whatever>' is much simpler and less likely to get out of date by
mistake. If you want to look at uninstalled packages, 'dpkg -c' will
show you their permissions.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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