Hi, > > On solaris you can mount given filesystem with norstchown parameter > > which gives the owner of the file the ability to chown the file to > > someone else. > > Yes, that's true. But this is unusual -- I've never > seen it done, and I've used a lot of Solaris systems. > Who uses it and why? It might be helpful to understand > their motiviation before diving into implementation.
That's my question also, but I don't have the answer at the moment. At the moment the complain is only about the fact that gzip used to work for them before patch 120719-02 and does not work now. (The patch contains the change mentioned earlier [1]). > Anyway, for reasons discussed in the earlier thread, > we can't simply change the code to do a chmod before > chown, as that would be wrong for typical platforms. > Nor does it make sense for this to be a configure-time > option, as even on Solaris gzip's current behavior > is typically correct now, and it's wrong only in the > unusual case where file systems have this mount option. Right. On the other hand, doing always chmod before chown on Solaris would also work, if I understand things correctly. It would work the same for the current majority of operations and in addition also for the norstchown case. But I understand the hesitation to break something which used to work for such a time :) > Nor should it be settable by a command-line option or > (even worse) an environment variable. Most users won't > know about the option. I agree. > Here's a better idea: have gzip detect when the destination > is on a file system that lets you give files away and where > it's correct to do the chmod before the chown. On platforms > that never let you give files away, this should take zero > instructions at run-time. On platforms like Solaris where > it depends on mount options, this should inspect the mount > options. > > Can you contribute code to do that? Sure. It's detectable by pathconf(2) syscall, looking for _PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED. If you will consider such a change I'm more than happy to work on the implementation. [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gzip.git;a=commitdiff;h=3477834ce69a74cb84d6efccd22716475cc506f3 Thank you -- Vlad
