Re: on the use of chmod/chown in maintainer scripts

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2012-05-12 at 22:47:22 +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 03:55:24PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > One option would be to make dpkg-deb use an internal tar implementation,
> > and add a file describing the attributes of the to be packaged files.
> > That might make needing root privs (either through fakeroot or sudo)
> > unneeded in most of the cases too.
> 
> I found that this functionality is already present in BSD tar,
> according to the manpage.  You can provide a file containing
> all the files to pack, plus their ownership and perms etc.,
> rather than just specifying the files on the command-line.
> 
> ----bsdtar(1)----
> An input file in mtree(5) format can be used to create an output archive
> with arbitrary ownership, permissions, or names that differ from existing
> data on disk:
[...]
> -----------------

Yeah, mtree is actually one of the things I've been having in mind
when considering ways to store file metadata in the dpkg suite.

> I can't see an equivalent in GNU tar.  But BSD tar is available
> in Debian.

This would imply BSD tar needs to be promoted to the Essential set
alongside GNU tar, at which point I might as well just use an
internal tar implementation.

thanks,
guillem