Bug#484841: staff group root equivalence
Hi,
On Mon, Mar 02 2009, Bdale Garbee wrote:
>
> I, too, have never used group 'staff' but have assumed others did since
> I seem to recall some push-back on the idea of changing this in the
> past.
I have, but that was a long time ago. Back at UMASS, we had a
situation where while the university employees and IT were supposed to
be in charge of the machines, and responsible for backups and other
major maintenance, research group faculty and graduate students ran
the machines (often paid for by grants in the first place).
So, the grad students and faculty were added to staff locally,
but did not have root access; (NIS was in use) they could isntall
things in /usr/local, and /usr/local came first in the PATH.
This way, each research group had special privileges to their
machines, but not any others, and the IT folks still had control.
Similar things were done at some of the larger companies I
worked for; so there is a use case. (And I think UNIX machines back in
the 80's and early 90's came set up that way by default; I know Ultrix
and OSF/1 did).
Whether you find that use case a compelling option for the
default is another thing.
manoj
--
Even a hawk is an eagle among crows.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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