Package: tech-ctte Severity: normal This is a delegation of the resolution of Bug#299007 to the Technical Committee under points 1 and 3 of section 6.1 of the Constitution. As Policy delegate, I am not comfortable making a final decision either way on this bug and ask that the tech-ctte please make a binding decision.
The dispute is over the following text in Debian Policy: The `/usr/local' directory itself and all the subdirectories created by the package should (by default) have permissions 2775 (group-writable and set-group-id) and be owned by `root.staff'. The proposed change is to state instead that the /usr/local directory itself and all the subdirectories created by the package should (by default) have permissions 755 and be owned by root:root. The contention in this proposal is that the current Policy-mandated behavior represents a potential security vulnerability since it allows elevation of a compromise of group staff to a root compromise since /usr/local/bin is in root's default path. The counter-contention is that the staff group is empty by default and it is up to the local system administrator to extend that privilege in a way consistent with the local site security policy. https://launchpad.net/bugs/13795 is the corresponding Ubuntu bug. According to that bug log, Ubuntu has chosen to diverge from Debian on this point. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]