Re: [gentoo-alt] enewuser() and consorts in eutils.eclass

[Dirk Tilger]

On Oct 18, 2007, at 1:53 AM, Dirk Tilger wrote:

> I was wondering what the motivation behind this is, i.e. what you guys
> count as the issues that have to be addressed (and that are not
> addressed in the current form), before this function and its
> friends in
> eutils can be called again.

I was partially able to answer the question myself and for the record
and anyone heading in the same direction, I thought I give some feedback
of what I have discovered.

The main misconception I had was that prefixed portage was all about  
having
all the software sitting below some prefixed location ($EPREFIX).  
However,
it is also a single-user package management system. A nice  
illustration to
me was:

| me@here ~ $ sudo emerge --config postgresql
| Password:
| emerge: superuser access is required.

> I've seen parts in enewuser() for example calling `dscl` to create
> Darwin NetInfo user accounts.

To take full advantage of the created user accounts in portage, one has
IMHO also to allow automatically changing ownership of files to them.

Changing ownership and permissions of files can be at least done in the
following ways:

- `fowners` and `fperms`
- calls to `chown` and `chmod` commands from ebuilds
- calls to `chown` and `chmod` commands from Makefile's and
   installation shellscripts
- calls to `chown` and `chmod` libc functions (i.e. BSD's `install`)

So a solution that would suit my taste [of minimizing the change] would
be to catch function calls to `chown` and `chmod` with a mechanism  
similar
to LD_PRELOAD. Now that is IMHO what the sandbox can do.

What is the current porting status of the sandbox?
Does anyone of you have some nice links for discussions on the topic?

Best regards,
Dirk.
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