[tex-live] umask 022

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Sun Mar 8 03:44:14 CET 2009


On 3/7/09, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:

>     2. Running texlive installation under root. In this case I'd assume this
>     is some sort of system wide installation to be used by one or more
> users.
>
> I agree that is a common use, but I don't think it's a safe assumption.
> Some people do installs as root on their own machine for various
> reasons, despite our recommendations otherwise.  (In fact, we recommend
> never installing as root.)
>
> And general, when root is doing the install, I am even less inclined to
> override the umask setting and guess at a *sysadmin*'s intentions.  What
> if they wanted 0770?  What if they intentionally wanted 0700 because
> they were going to chown it later?  Who knows, could be anything ...
>
> We could put up a warning when installing as root, especially if umask
> is not appropriate, but would you have have actually noticed it and
> switched your umask?  I'm not sure it's worth it.
>
> Sorry, I'm not seeing a good answer ...
>
>     Keep in mind that rpm package manager (the same applies with deb) would
>     not take umask 077 as a criterion for setting permissions of installed
>     files as this is most probably not what is intended.
>
> rpm and deb can assume they are installing packages to be used by any
> user of the current host, since that is their whole purpose.  We can't.

The people who would be affected by this problem should be capable of
changing the permissions, so the impact of leaving umask alone is a minor
annoyance to a few.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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