Re: Stephen White's proposal involving a `private' group
Stephen White writes:
>> [ private group to which no one belongs but which is the group
>> owner of their home directories ]
As Matt Birkholz writes, interesting idea.
Ian Jackson writes
> [ can't chgrp files to private in case they're not already ]
> [ new directories do not inherit setgid ]
Yes, I came up the same idea simultaneously and was
investigating it on the Suns here at work a few days ago and
came across these problems. Actually, though I don't notice the
second. I thought it wouldn't inherit either the setgid bit
_or_ the group, and I was so surprised when it got the group
that I didn't notice the lack of setgid.
Warning : unix/linux speculation/wishlist mode follows which
doesn't necessarily have to do with debian follows:
1. What would be nice is a group which is a true "nullgroup" --
everyone can change their files to nullgroup , but no one gets
any permission through this -- group permissions are ignored. In
effect the file would effectively have no group. I thought the
current "nogroup" (gid 65534) on Suns would do this, but no.
2. Another nice thing would be to have files which inherit
a umask from the directory as well as the gid: if a dir
was 2775, then files created would be 664 or 775. (unless
explicitly changed) i(this might require a magic umask as well
e.g. -1)
These would both require kernel changes.
wishlist mode OFF.
Serious now :-) What this proposal would have saved is
the large group file. But I don't think is a problem.
As for the other issues -- NFS and version control --
I haven't found any problem in the current proposal
with respect to those, either.
--
-Matt Hannigan
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