Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Aug 09, Seth Alan Woolley [seth AT positivism.org] wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 11:15:11PM +0200, Karsten Behrmann wrote:
> > > On Aug 09, Karsten Behrmann [BearPerson AT gmx.net] wrote:
> > > > Hi all!
> > > > Just wanted to use this thread to get a general opinion on what 
> > > > should be
> > > > in the ISO /etc/passwd and /etc/group. We have a minimum at [0], but 
> > > > static
> > > > /dev or udev already wants a few groups not in there. However, I'd 
> > > > kindof
> > > > like to keep the lists minimal. Why would you want to have a MySQL 
> > > > user if you
> > > > never had it installed?
> > > 
> > > Like I mentioned in IRC a bit ago, I think we should add the wheel 
> > > group to
> > > this list.  Right now we don't define wheel at all and that's kind of 
> > > odd.
> > > Production systems with multiple administrators expect to use that 
> > > group,
> > > for those boxes it's much more important than 'audio'.
> > 
> > no "audio" group will make our /dev system fail though. no wheel doesn't
> > kill anyone directly...
> 
> Our packages install as root:root, not root:wheel.  Perhaps we can have 
> an option to sorcery to install root:root files as root:wheel?
> 
> (idea being, set the option, then rebuild).
> 
> Having an easy way to use a wheel-based group admin system gives one 
> less reason for admins to choose another distro.

Well, the more important thing about 'wheel-based ... admin' is that the
wheel group controls who can su/sudo to do things as root, not so much the
group ownership of file.

But yes, we definitely need the group at least available.  At the least it
should be added by shadow and sudo if it doesn't exist when they install,
but IMO does belong in the base group file.  In a very real way it is the
most important group for the way quite a lot of multi-user systems are run.

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