[pacman-dev] Directory permission warnings

[Allan McRae]

On 01/02/15 01:14, Andrew Gregory wrote:
> On 01/31/15 at 11:56pm, Allan McRae wrote:
>> It seems people are getting really confused with the directory
>> permission warnings that makepkg prints when upgrading a package that
>> changes some permissions in its install script.
>>
>> There are a few ways to deal with this:
>>
>> 1) some packages have a reserved user:group ids - these should be
>> chmoded in the PKGBUILD rather than the install scriptlet.
>>
>> 2) We somehow flag those directories/files that will change permissions.
>>  This will stop the directory permission warnings and -Qkk errors.
>>
>> 3) I opened a bug a couple of years ago:
>> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/30185 .  Most (all?) of the directory
>> permission warnings are for directories owned by an individual package.
>>  So we should just fix the permissions.  This will still leave -Qkk errors.
>>
>>
>> Any other thoughts on this?
>>
>> A
> 
> For dynamically created users, which is the only reason install
> scripts should be setting ownership, my preferred solution would be to
> use symbolic names in the package.[1]  Pacman support should be
> trivial, but I don't know of a *good* way to get the ownership
> information into the package tarball at the moment.  We could hack
> something together using libarchive, and, if everybody else agrees, we
> might be able to get something similar to NetBSD mtree's -N switch
> into bsdtar to do it more cleanly.[2]
> 
> That doesn't help the situation where a package changes ownership
> between versions, though.  Manually changing directory ownership feels
> a little wrong to me, but as long as we adjust NoUpgrade to allow
> users to prevent it, I think it's acceptable.  I don't think using
> a flag to suppress warnings is a good idea.  Incorrect ownership can
> cause problems.  If the packager flags a directory that really does
> need particular ownership the user wouldn't have any notice of the
> discrepancy.
> 
> [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/43484
> [2] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi/man?mtree+8+NetBSD-current
> 

I agree that sounds a better long term solution.

I'm going to look at changing the directories permission when a single
package owns the directory.  This brings changes to directory
permissions into line with files.  This will get rid of the majority of
warnings people are having with pacman-4.2 in Arch and stop things
happening like:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/43644

Allan