Re: on the use of chmod/chown in maintainer scripts
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 12:23:49PM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> A lot of daemon packages in Debian nowadays create their own user and groups
> during installation. Usually this also implies that a couple of files and
> directories are created, and then chmodded and chowned to some appropriate
> value for the service in question.
>
> Any ideas what we should do?
Like for other parts of the packaging and maintainer scripts, I think
this is something which should be entirely declarative, and handled
at the dpkg or debhelper level.
In the case of adding users and groups, it would be helpful to have
e.g. a dh_user and/or dh_group script which look at
debian/${package}.(user|group) and put the appropriate
adduser/useradd commands into the package preinst or postinst, and
depends/pre-depends on the needed tools as appropriate.
This can also add the appropriate commands for removal in the postrm
(or not, as the consensus currently appears to be). But the policy
for that can be set by debhelper.
Why the preinst? If all static or dynamic users and groups are made
available before unpacking the data.tar, we can just unpack the tar
and the users/groups in the files and directories could be
automatically used. No manual chmod/chown would be required, since
this would all be handled transparently by dpkg.
With the above approach, the only hard question is how to set the
ownership during the package build. fakeroot handles this just fine,
but it does require the user/group to be present on the build
system, which will not always be the case. Is there an alternative
means to set/override the ownership during packing of a tarfile?
Regards,
Roger
--
.''`. Roger Leigh
: :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
`. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools
`- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800
Reply to: