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

[Andreas Barth <aba@ayous.org>]

* Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) [120512 23:06]:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > Unless we expect that two different binary packages that can be
> > co-installed will distribute the same directory under different
> > ownership or permissions for a good reason, why not simply let dpkg
> > apply ownership and permissions found in data.tar.{gz|bz2|xz},
> 
> Usually because the UID is dynamically assigned and the user is created in
> the postinst, so there's no way for dpkg do do this at unpack.
> 
> You would need to apply permissions by name, not UID/GID, and you would
> need to create all users in preinst prior to unpack, which would require
> Pre-Depends on adduser with all the complexity that entails.  I haven't
> thought through that path to see if there are any other problems.

Wouldn't it be sensible to describe which user(s) a programm needs as
well not by "adduser $user" but in a more abstract syntax and let dpkg
handle all of that?


Andi