Odd ACL question

[Harti Brandt]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:

TK>In tinkering with libarchive's support for ACLs,
TK>I've run across a head-scratcher:
TK>
TK>Joerg Schilling's "star" archives ACLs as follows:
TK>
TK>"user::rwx,group::r--,group:mail:rw-:6,mask::rw-,other::r--"
TK>
TK>Note the "group:mail:rw-:6" entry that contains a fourth
TK>field with the uid/gid number.  FreeBSD's acl_from_text
TK>chokes on this, although Joerg asserts that posix1e
TK>permits additional fields.
TK>
TK>Question: Should acl_from_text be altered to ignore
TK>additional fields?
TK>
TK>What I can't quite figure out is whether or not this
TK>uid/gid field is really useful.  It seems like it might
TK>be useful when moving archives across systems, but
TK>I'm not entirely convinced that it's right to restore
TK>the uid if the username doesn't exist.
TK>
TK>Question:  Is this a useful extension?

It definitely is. Joerg and I had several hours of talk on this issue.
If you, for example, restore on a system that usually gets its passwd from
YP or LDAP and you don't have it available at the moment you'll appreciate
the possibility to restore from numerical user ids. I think some tar's
use 'nobody' inb such cases. This may leave users with undeletable files
in their directories (undeletable for the user).

As far as I know there are options to star that let you select the exact
behaviour in these cases.

harti
-- 
harti brandt,
http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/research/cc/cats/employees/hartmut.brandt/private
brandt at fokus.fraunhofer.de, harti at freebsd.org