Re: PATCH: Re: adding a toplevel zsh.spec.in file

[Wayne Davison <wayned@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Since RedHat made the decision to put every user in a separate
> group -- something that baffles me to this day

I read the reason for this, and I kind of like this strategy.  Here's
the gist of it:

We want the default to be for (normal) newly-created files to be only
writable by the owner that created them PLUS we want to make it easy
for new, group-shared files to be writable by a particular group.

In a more "normal" setup, the umask is 022, which requires you to
manually "chmod g+w" files that need to be group writable.

The RedHat solution is to set a umask of 002 (for non-super users) and
to have the default group for each user be one that only the user is a
member of.  That way, most new files are still only writable by the
owner (even with a group-writable permission) PLUS a directory with a
sticky-group flag set gets files created in it that are group-writable
without having to twiddle any file permissions.  Kinda neat.

> Obviously the maintainers of those environments believe that there's
> value in the settings they place in those files.

I think that RedHat/Mandrake would do well to remove all the alias,
setopt, and similar setup that is going on in these /etc files and
move it into the skel files that get installed for new users.  This
way a new user gets whatever extra setup the packager thought was
desirable AND they can see the options and aliases to be able to tweak
them AND an advanced user can just overwrite these files without
having to add "unalias" commands and turn off non-default options
in otherwise portable rc files.

..wayne..