PMS 12.2 specifies that: > The owner, group and mode (including set*id and sticky bits) of the directory must be preserved [...] What if two packages install the same directory with different permissions? For example, package A installs: /usr/lib/foo/foo where /usr/lib/foo is 0755. Package B installs: /usr/lib/foo/bar where /usr/lib/foo is 0700. Per spec, PM would have to preserve permissions of both directories which is just impossible. The behavior nearest to correct would be erroring out because of non-matching permissions. I think we either have to specify that packages are actually obligated to share same permissions for each and every directory installed, or decide clearly how to handle such a case.
Are there any ebuilds in the tree that have such conflicting permissions, or is this a hypothetical scenario?
(In reply to comment #1) > Are there any ebuilds in the tree that have such conflicting permissions, or is > this a hypothetical scenario? Hypothetical. Don't think anyone checks that right now.
Actually, things are "worse" with symlinks: If the user decided to turn /usr/lib/foo into a symlink (e.g. in order to move that directory to a different partition for whatever reason), hell would break loose if merging would "transform" that symlink into a directory. My suggestion is to specify that existing directories are not modified during merging (which is what portage currently seems to be doing).
PMS is worded so that you never have to turn a directory into a symlink or a symlink into a directory.
(In reply to comment #0) > > The owner, group and mode (including set*id and sticky bits) of the > > directory must be preserved [...] Hm, and that sentence continues: | [...] except as follows: | • Any directory owned by the user used to perform the build must become | owned by the root user. | • Any directory whose group is the primary group of the user used to | perform the build must have its group be that of the root user. And there is a similar wording in the section about plain files. It implies that at some point the PM has to do a chown/chgrp root on these files. However, it is not specified when exactly this should be done. So I wonder if the spec could/should be tightened? Looks like Portage does these owner changes immediately after src_install, is it the same for the other PMs?
I think it should be saying that it only holds if the directory is newly created.
