Re: user private groups and a src group
Daniel Quinlan wrote:
>> I'm sorry -- maybe I'm totally clueless here, but I don't seen much
>> inherent advantage in giving each private user their own group,
>> especially considering how /etc/groups is off-limits to users.
>>
>> If there are advantages, let's hear them.
David Engel writes:
> Perhaps I can shed some light on this. Daniel, as you noted above,
> most users tend to set their umasks to 022 or 077. This works fine
> for keeping other users from modifying (or even seeing) their personal
> files. However, when a user needs to work with truly shared files
> (where any member of the group can write to the any file), each user
> has to remember to manually change his/her umask to 002 and then
> remember to change it back when done. If the umask isn't changed,
> other group members won't have write access to any new or modified
> files. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm sure that my coworkers
> and I would always be forgetting to change our umasks. This is where
> the admitted hack of creating private groups comes in. It allows
> users to always leave their umasks set to the more useful 002 without
> compromising the security of their personal files.
That's it?
This seems like an awfully ugly hack for something that could be fixed
with a shell script or two on a local basis or perhaps even a low-level
change.
This doesn't seem like the kind of thing that Debian, still in
development, should be trying to do. I admit that the single benefit
is nice, but I see this as an exhibition of a "creeping feature" --
something that will cause us more problems in the long run than
anything else.
Not many Linux users will have a use for it and fewer still will
understand it. More trouble and ugliness than it is worth. We should
be worrying about fixing bugs, not creating new ones.
Dan
--
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu>
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