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

[Neale Pickett]

This is very helpful. Thank you!

On Mon Jan 05 2015 at 2:06:50 PM Leonid Isaev <lisaev at umail.iu.edu> wrote:

> 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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>