Re: setting umask globally

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, martin f krafft wrote:

> If one is faced with the task to set the umask globally for all
> users and shells, this turns out to be a job of redundancy: every
> shell uses its own file in /etc, and you end up making changes to
> 5 files or more (depending on the number of installed shells).
> What's worse: change the umask and you'll possibly forget one shell
> or the other, which may cause delays in your user's work, or even
> break things (yeah, you should not rely on umask; yeah, don't tell
> me...)
>
> [ snipped gigantic hack ]
>
> So the plan is:
>
>   1. gather comments.
>   2. file a bug against base-files to have the files included.
>   3. once base-files hits unstable, mass-file bugs against all
>      compatible shells and ask them to use it.
>   4. rejoice.
>
> So, let's start at (1)...

This is Unix, and we are system integrators. Our job is to make things
simpler, not more complex. I wonder why people always consider
base-files as the package of choice to implement all sorts of ugly
global hacks.

There is already an umask setting in /etc/login.defs. If it makes people
happy, I will happily drop the umask setting from /etc/profile, so
that people do not have to decide between login.defs and profile
when trying to set an umask globally.

Then we could make policy (or just convince the shell maintainers) that
shells should not set umask in their default global initialization
scripts, so that they do not override the one in /etc/login.defs.