[gentoo-amd64] Re: firefox vs firefox-bin restored on kde session

[Duncan]

Beso <givemesugarr@×××××.com> posted
d257c3560711270039h58edc4e9iff4ea98c72df0841@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:39:03 +0100:

> anyway for what i know of kde sessions you just need to remove
> everything in:
>
> /var/tmp/kdecache-<user>
> /tmp/ksocket-<user>
>
> and have these directories writable (but if you login they should
> already be writable). just in case do a ls -l on them and see if they
> are at least drwxr--r--  2 <user> users (this means that the directory
> is owned by the user, of group users which has full permissions, while
> the group members have read permission and the other users not in the
> users group have read permissions). this is the minimum required
> permissions for kde to run. if they're are lower (for the specific user)
> kde won't work.

Hmmm... this isn't entirely correct, as I run KDE as my desktop 
environment of choice (and am running it now), and have neither of those 
directories, let alone have them at those permissions.  KDE (3.5.8) is 
working just fine.

You may be describing the defaults (which IIRC are at least close to that 
location, tho your permissions look strange to me), but as it happens, 
both those locations are indirect.  The actual location KDE uses (at 
least here) is several subdirs deep in the user's homedir, with the 
default apparently being symlinks to the locations you describe.  
However, if you point those symlinks elsewhere (as I have)...

If I'm not mistaken, you will probably find the symlinks under ~/.kde3.5/.

In that subdir here, I have one symlink called tmp-<host> (host being the 
machine's domain name), which points to /tmp/tmp-<user>/kde/kde-<user>.  
That's KDE's tmpdir, and the path reflects the manual tweaking I've done 
to better organize my system tmpdir by user.  I simply pointed the 
symlink at the desired location, and it stays that way.

The /var/tmp location you listed is similarly handled, only here, 
/var/tmp is a symlink to the tmpfs mounted /tmp, so everything that'd go 
in /var/tmp ends up in /tmp, which being tmpfs, is ensured to be just 
that, temporary.  (I have a script that runs at boot to setup the 
necessary /tmp subdirs and give them the proper permissions so X and KDE 
work.)

The problem I noticed was that with what would have been /var/tmp 
recreated entirely clean at each boot, KDE was forgetting some useful 
things.  Most of them it reconstructed as necessary without issue, but 
the favicons for my various knewsticker subscriptions would be blank for 
sometime after reboot, and I didn't like that, so I decided I needed to 
do something about it.  Turns out that the location KDE actually uses is 
again in ~/kde3.5, in this case, cache-<host>, which is normally a 
symlink to /var/tmp/whatever.  Again, by pointing that symlink elsewhere, 
in this case to ~/config/cache/kdecache-<user>, I avoided the problem of 
KDE forgetting this sort of cached content.  Really, it doesn't belong 
in /var/tmp anyway, but /var/cache or similar.  However, I found it more 
useful to keep it under my user's homedir, so that's where I pointed the 
link.

OK, so that's where my similar dirs are located, and what pointers I had 
to re-point to the new location.  What about permissions?  

Well, regardless of the permissions on the individual cache dir, the 
user's homedir is set unreadable by other users.  Therefore, it's 
obviously NOT necessary for it to be readable by other users -- and I 
can't see why it would need to be and find it a rather disturbing 
security issue to even consider it, anyway.  Why would I want stuff in my 
cache readable by other users?  Of course, it's really just me using it, 
so no big deal, but certainly in a general multi-user situation, I'd find 
it rather privacy invasive if other users, particularly those in other 
groups (conceivably I may wish it to be readable by those in my group), 
could browse my cache files at will!  That said, the dir itself is 0750, 
so rwxr-x---.  Those in the same group could read it if it weren't under 
the 700 permed homedir, but any random user, regardless of group 
membership.

As for the tmpdir, /tmp/tmp-<user>/kde/kde-<user> is perms 0700 all the 
way from the tmp-<user> level, so three nested subdirs deep of 0700 
perms.  Why on earth would another user need access to it?

So anyway, as I said, neither of those dirs have to be the given world-
read permissions, nor in fact do they even have to exist at all if the 
user's ~/kde3.5/* symlinks to them are pointed elsewhere, for KDE to work 
properly.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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