Re: wrong GID owner breaks execution of X

[Santiago Vila]

> On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 02:05:27PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> >
> > This is normal dpkg behaviour.
> >
> > You should get the right permissions if you reinstall the system from
> > scratch using base-files_3.0.3 (alternatively, you can change them
> > yourself by hand). As far as base-files is concerned, this is fixed.
>
> Yes, base-files seems correct to me as its directories are GID root:
>
> > > bilbo:/tmp# dpkg --contents base-files_3.0.3_hurd-i386.deb | grep tmp
> > > drwxrwxrwt root/root         0 2002-06-04 15:42:18 ./tmp/
> > > drwxrwxrwt root/root         0 2002-06-04 15:42:18 ./var/tmp/
>
> but dpkg is expected to update file permissions/owners isn't it?

No, actually it's not expected to do that.

The current behaviour allows users to override permissions on
directories without having to worry about them again after upgrades.

The side effect, of course, is that wrong permissions are not
automatically "fixed" by dpkg, because dpkg does not know whether they
are different because they were wrong, or because you wanted them to
be different.

The current dpkg behaviour assumes the user knows what he/she is doing.
I don't think dpkg maintainers will want to change it, but feel free to ask.