Re: user private groups and a src group
Bill Mitchell appears to be proposing an argument of the form:
"If we do XYZ some people will not understand it,
therefore we should not do XYZ."
It doesn't matter that they don't understand it. Those that want to
can go and read `man chmod'. I think the number of people who would
notice that the bit was set but not know how to find out what it did
would be quite small.
Even if there were many such people, a quick "I wonder why they did it
like that, oh well it seems to work right ..." is hardly confusion.
He also makes the point that I had to explain my proposal here on this
list, presumably to demonstrate that all the users need to see my
explanation as well.
However, this list is intended (I believe) for discussion of what
should be done with Debian, in various respects. It is clearly
necessary to explain the proposal to people who are being asked to
make a decision.
The individual users of debian aren't being asked to make this
decision, and don't even need to know that it has been made for them.
BTW, the fact that I had to explain what the setgid bit did (rather
than people trying it out for themselves), and that some people still
haven't twigged, reflects poorly on the experience of some members of
this list, I think.
He also writes.
> Not to mention, of course, my followup point about needing to make
> this scheme easily turn-offable if debian adopts it, in order to
> avoid alienating potential users who will be opposed to it on
> religious grounds. We've seen several article from people holding
> such religious views on this list lately.
"Religious grounds" is no grounds. I've only seen post stating a
"religious" objection, and that post was free of content.
Bill Mitchell's argument here is of the form:
"Some people oppose it and we must accomodate them
so I oppose it too."
This is clearly silly. I suggest to Bill Mitchell that he goes and
reads the alt.atheism FAQ file on logical argument, rtfm.mit.edu:
/pub/usenet/news.answers/atheism/logic.
(NB this document does not advocate atheism, it just so happens that
the readers of alt.atheism feel that they're confronted too often by
people who can't think straight.)
Ian.
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