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

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

* Andreas Barth [2012-05-13 11:06 +0200]:
> * 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

I agree.

> and let dpkg handle all of that?

This doesn't look like a task that should be done by dpkg itself;
instead debhelper or dpkg-maintscript-helper could be used.


Carsten