Am 25.01.2014 17:13, schrieb Maxime Gauduin:
The reason why permissions should be set in the PKGBUILD is because that way pacman can track them. Then it's up to the maintainer to choose UIDs/GIDs that do not conflict with official packages, and to the user to check that they don't already use that particular UID/GID ,before installing an AUR package.
This is not optimal, but there's a list of UIDs and GIDs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:UID_/_GID_Database Beyond that, there's two comments I have: 1) Software shouldn't really rely on files being owned/writable by certain users. An application is either a system service, which can adjust the needed permissions at runtime before dropping privileges - thus no need to hardcode uids or even user names. If the application is a user application, then it writes with the user's permissions anyway. If an admin wants a user application to run system-wide, it's his job to set up user and working directory. In short: apart from very few system-specific groups, the package manager should not be involved here, and packages that need files owned by special non-root users should be fixed. 2) *If* we really need specific UIDs, then pacman should gain a feature where it translates ownership during package extraction.