Re: user private groups and a src group
Daniel Quinlan asks:
>> 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.
Ian Jackson answers:
> Well, the low level change might be equivalence of uids and gids
> (Hurd, anyone?) but I don't think we're ready for that. And even if
> we were, this would be the first step towards it.
Agreed.
>> More trouble and ugliness than it is worth. We should
>> be worrying about fixing bugs, not creating new ones.
> It's neither troublesome nor ugly and it does not create new bugs.
My point was really that there are a *lot* of bugs which are being
fixed for Debian 0.92. Quite often, when new features are added, bugs
are also introduced. (GNU finger, dip exec'ing /etc/ifconfig even
after it was moved to /sbin, my split of Emacs didn't take into account
the different DOC file formats for X and non-X implementations, etc.)
I'd like to hold this off until the next version, so that it causes
less trouble. After hearing Ian's excellent summarisation, I think
that this might be a good thing for Debian. I've been convinced.
(However, I am glad that I got the complete explanation out of Ian
Jackson. :-)
> Please can we have this in before Debian 1.0 - otherwise we're going
> to find it virtually impossible to migrate, because all the
> installations will already have groups with the gids we're going to
> need to use. This arrangement is quite hard to retrofit, but very
> easy and straightforward to do from the beginning.
I've already made my point about waiting until 0.9x, but I'd like to
see someone other than Ian Murdock (someone very familiar with this)
handle the necessary changes, including the preparation of a list of
things which need to be changed or rewritten, and then rewriting them.
Dan
--
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu>
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