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Re: building 2.6.35



On 2010-08-12 19:25 +0200, Bob Proulx wrote:

> Stephen Powell wrote:
>> I do know about groups, but I don't necessarily know the intended
>> purpose of all of the pre-defined groups in a Linux system.  Where
>> can I find documentation for that?
>
> Unfortunately I have no idea.  I don't even know if they are all
> documented someplace.  And distro to distro those will vary since they
> tend to be local administration conventions.

For Debian, there is some information in the /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/
directory.

>> Still, I should have noticed that the /usr/src directory was owned
>> by user root and by group src.  For some reason, I never made that
>> connection.  That's a great tip, thanks.  I will have to play around
>> with this.  If I can get everything to work, then the next revision
>> of my kernel building web page will be revised accordingly.
>
> Don't berate yourself.  There is too much information in the universe
> to know all of it!  Only by working together can we manage to get a
> handle on even a small fraction of it.

Yes, even the base-passwd maintainers who keep the users and groups with
ID < 100 in sync across Debian installations have sometimes no clue what
a specific group is or was good for.  Here is what they say about the
'bin' and 'sys' groups:

,----
| bin
| 
|     HELP: No files on my system are owned by user or group bin. What good are
|     they? Historically they were probably the owners of binaries in /bin? It is
|     not mentioned in the FHS, Debian Policy, or the changelogs of base-passwd
|     or base-files.
| [...]
| 
| sys
| 
|     HELP: As with bin, except I don't even know what it was good for
|     historically.
`----

Sven


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