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Re: Sticky premissions.



On Wed, Oct 24, 2001, guy keren wrote about "Re: Sticky premissions.":
> On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Adi Stav wrote:
> you're missing the point. the question is not "how do we force users to
> have things done against their will". the question is "how, for a given
> case, we can help the users have things done _for_ their will". have you
> never collaborated with people, and gotten into the regular case of smeone
> creating a file in a directory that's supposed to belong to a group (say,
> some documentation files) and the file is not readable to others, because
> the owner forgot to set the right permissions? actually, in such
> collaborative environemtns, there is no meaning to the user owner - only
> to the group. in these cases, the user part only gets in the way of doing
> things.

By the way, one useful trick for a directory shared by a group supposed
to modify in it is to use RCS. The group-owned directory only contains the
",v" files, and it is set to g+s so new ",v" files created in the correct
group. Each users symlinks a RCS subdirectory to that shared directory.
The main point to notice is that RCS doesn't write to ,v files: it reads
the old content, deletes the old file, and writes a new file. This means
that users only have to allow for group read permission, rather than group
write permission, in their umasks, which in 99% of the situations is ok.

As an added bonus, RCS also saves the group from a lot of troube caused by
concurrent editing of the same file, someone checking it a crappy change,
and so on.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |   Wednesday, Oct 24 2001, 7 Heshvan 5762
nyh@math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Unix is user friendly - it's just picky
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |about it's friends.

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