On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 12:36:34 +1300 martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> wrote: > also sprach Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> [2010.02.04.1222 +1300]: > > If you set the permissions with chown, aren't they overwritten > > every time the package is upgraded and then have to be reset again, > > leaving windows on every upgrade when they have the wrong > > permissions? > > Maybe dpkg could be taught to preserve permissions on files that > already exist (i.e. on upgrades)? Actually, that is exactly what dpkg-statoverride is for. Administrators can set overrides, which prevents dpkg from overwriting permissions. If dpkg just didn't overwrite permissions, then when package maintainers actually do need to change permissions on files that they had set with previous packages, they couldn't. gpg, for example, was set 4755 some time ago, to prevent paging your passwords to disk. Then some time later, that no longer required root permissions, so gpg was set to 755. If dpkg never overwrote permissions, then gpg would not have been able to update these permissions on upgrade. -Brandon
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