Changing daemon user, dir ownership and updating packages

[Gleb Popov]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 10:13 PM Dewayne Geraghty <
dewayne at heuristicsystems.com.au> wrote:

> On 26/04/2021 6:03 pm, Stefan Bethke wrote:
> > But that still leaves pkg updating the ownership/mode of existing
> directories as a surprise on updating a package. I think the "right" thing
> here would be a kind of three-way merge between changes an updated package
> brings in vs. changes the user has made on their system.
>
> Sometimes the right thing isn't easy ;)
>
> There are some cases where I explicitly assign ownership and more
> restrictive modes to installed ports.  Would "pkg add -I" prevent file
> ownership/mode changes or just prevent the execution of installation
> scripts... (hint for a flag to prevent file mode/ownership changes on
> existing systems)
>
> I suspect Gleb's paradigm of a separate file to explicitly control file
> attributes (after upgrades) is reasonable, but this is problematic and
> negates the value of a packaging system.
>

It only shifts the task of organizing runtime files/dirs to the software
upstream, which is a right thing, IMO. The same way we use automatic
pkg-plist generation for Python easyinstall-based ports.

That tmpfiles.d thing seems to be an established way to do that sort of
stuff in the Linux world, so I believe we should get on the train too.