Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

On Mar 06, Eric Sandall [eric AT sandall.us] wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Mar 2006, Karsten Behrmann wrote:
> <snip>
> >> 2)
> >> The possibility to add new user is great. :-)
> >> IMHO, the default group should be named identically to login
> >> (lace:lace). Now it uses "users" by default.
> > Hmm... I'm not quite sure I'd personally agree with that. Wasn't the
> > purpose of group permissions to be a bit more granular that per-user?
> > It would make sense to give or take permissions to/from "all other human
> > users" or something, but why would you want group permissions for a group
> > that only you are in? Sure, there is root:root for normal files, but 
> > except
> > for that one I kindof don't see the purpose in one-user groups...
> > Feel free to disagree with me.
> 
> I believe the standard is <username>:users, as there is a users group
> in /etc/group and, IMO, it'd be silly to populate /etc/group with a
> group account for each user.

There are at least two "standards" for this.  Using a single "users" group
is older, but using a group per user has become very common since RedHat
popularized it several years ago.  Google 'per-user groups' to see some of
the reasons why it's useful.  The big one is that it allows users to have
more granular control of their files, since if the only group a user has
access to is "users" they have to go all or none when letting others access
their files, but if they each get their own group they can get people added
to it and maintain a useful distinction between group and world access.

That having been said, and even though I greatly prefer per-user groups
myself, different admins still prefer it different ways.  IMO we should
therefore default to the option that has the least impact on the system,
and that's one "users" group.  It's easier to move from that to per-user
groups than the reverse.  Though if someone wanted to add this as a system
option in the installer I think it would be a nice touch and in the SMGL
spirit.

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