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From: alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.readers
Subject: Re: Two queries regarding C-News (one of which also hits rn)
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.104655.11340@panix.uucp>
Date: 29 Jun 91 10:46:55 GMT
References: <1991Jun27.201257.29111@zoo.toronto.edu> <1991Jun28.084515.29919@panix.uucp> <1991Jun28.170745.6774@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY
Lines: 45

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>>The problem is that if you run delgroups as root...
>>... I think delgroups should have lines to
>>do appropriate chowns and chmods.
>There is fundamentally no way we can bulletproof our software against
>incompetent administrators; we refuse to expend substantial efforts trying.
>And the effort *is* substantial, because those "lines to do appropriate
>chowns and chmods" are Unix-version-dependent and need to be configurable
>in several ways.  We're also unhappy at the thought of the sheer number
>of files that would need to have such lines sprinkled into them.

Would you please explain this? I'm willing to be convinced but I don't see
how this can be. You already know about chown and chmod from the build script.
And you already know what the name of the news ID is. What more do you need?
Is there really a Unix where
chmod 644 active ; chown news active
won't do the trick? (You'd use variables, of course, I'm just keeping things
simple.

(Hm. Thinking about it, does active have to belong to the news _group_ as well
as ID? It still shouldn't matter- you know about that from build too.)

Also, how many such scripts are there? The only one I've ever run into on this
is delgroup. (There may be others that I've never messed up with.)

If you only did the "right" think, Cnews would be lots smaller, a little
faster, and too troublesome for many people to run. Fortunately for us all,
you generally do the good thing instead of the right thing, at least enough
for us to generally cope. ("Do the good thing"? Spike Lee's sequel? :-)

I think that the delgroups problem is a common enough failure that it's worth
a few extra lines of code.

While I'm discussing scripts, on A/UX addgroups fails to figure out the name
of the creator, if a group is created locally. That's because $USER isn't
defined. But $LOGNAME does. I'm not sure but I think some other unixes have
this too. If so, could you use "${USER-${LOGNAME-unknown}}" instead of
"${USER-unknown}" in addgroups?

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
alexis@panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis