[arch-general] Standard group for "hardware user"?

[Leonid Isaev]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 07:12:41PM +0000, Neale Pickett wrote:
> I run mdev instead of systemd-udev and was just alerted to the deprecation
> of all the groups I'd been using. Looking at the filesystem package, it
> seems that most of them are still present, but I presume they'll go away
> eventually.

In general... The groups you are talking about (i.e. optical, etc.) are
arbitrary to begin with, so there is no strict requirement for having them. On
a (current) Arch system your user doesn't need to be in any of these groups, so
you can manually delete them. The reason is, as you said, that logind grants
device access to local users. Of course, this logic won't work if you'd like to
e.g. play audio over ssh (you'll have to be a member of audio).

Regarding the "standard" group list, I'd do the following:
(1) Look at /usr/lib/sysuser.d/*. This is the systemd way (tm) of defining
"standard" groups. The filesystem .install script follows this convention,
AFAIK. So, these groups are unlikely to be deprecated in Arch, unless they are
also deprecated in systemd (which might happen on a whim of course).
(2) Clone Arch SVN repos and grep the .install scripts for udev rules that set
device permissions to the above groups. I don't think there will be many (lvm2
and device-mapper come to mind).

If in (2) no packages come up, then just ignore Arch default groups (in the
filesystem package). You already run a non-standard udev (mdev), so you'll have
to make sure that the device nodes are created with a correct u+g permissions
(via some rules). These rules will define your "standard" group list.
Otherwise, stick with systemd groups.

HTH,
-- 
Leonid Isaev
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