Re: [TAF] wiki://DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/
Mike Gabriel wrote:
> On Mo 23 Jan 2012 22:29:41 CET Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>>[Justin B Rye]
>>> * Don't call them "file groups" - that would mean groups of files.
>>
>> In my vocabulary, they are actually named 'file groups' as opposed to
>> 'net groups' which is a different kind of groups on Linux. The
>> distiction is important, as we use both file and net groups in Debian
>> Edu.
>
> I heard this expression (file groups) from Petter for the first time
> and wasn't sure what he meant, either. I always refer to them as
> POSIX groups. But maybe other people (non-Unix folks) do not know
> what that is...
Yes; it's not the files, it's the users (and their processes) that
belong to groups; and this regulates access to the files with those
group-ownerships. Talking about "filesystem groups" would make a kind
of sense, but again it sounds as if it's talking about LVM or
something. "POSIX groups" is correct but obscure; "user groups" would
make sense but it's hopelessly double-booked.
The concept of "net groups" must have been a NISism originally, but I
don't see "file groups" in any of the online docs for NIS or LDAP -
almost all the Google hits are in the SQL groups-of-files sense.
(So the best solution I could think of was just to call them "groups",
but make sure I'd already set the context of UNIX permissions.)
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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