[rt-users] Liberal chgrp during install

Gary Rule grule at bbn.com
Tue Jul 8 17:23:47 EDT 2003


Hello all,
	I'm new to the list and to the RT system. I've been put in charge of
updating our old rt version 2 system with the latest version. First let
me say that we as a department have been very happy with RT and I'm in
no way complaining about this software. We find it useful and are happy
to have it available for free, especially with tight budgets in this
economy. But I would like to point something out.

	During the install (when I type make install) I noticed that RT's make
install does something I find kind of strange, it changes the group of
all files in the sysconfig directory (PREFIX/etc) to the group rt. 

My configure line specifies --prefix=/usr/local which is where I like to
install a lot of the software on my servers. 


chmod 0500 //usr/local/etc/*
chown -R root //usr/local/etc
chgrp -R rt //usr/local/etc

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ pretty scary.

Why does this not just change the group/perms on the files that it
installed instead of the other configuration files I have in that
directory? I have sudoers in there as well as my ssh config files.
Needless to say they were all pretty hosed and I had to restore group
and permissions on these files. 

I'd be interested in knowing if there is a good reason for this and if
not I'd like to suggest the install process only make changes to the
files it puts in place or at least prompt before doing a chgrp
/on/some/directory/*

The rest of the command were fairly sane such as:

chown root //usr/local/bin/webmux.pl //usr/local/bin/rt-mailgate
//usr/local/bin/rt-crontool //usr/local/bin/mason_handler.fcgi
//usr/local/bin/mason_handler                                                    
Although it did change permissions on some of my directories that I
would rather have done by hand, or not done at all. That would have
allowed me to re-think where I wanted to install RT if permissions which
I did not want to apply were required.


Thanks,

Gary Rule




More information about the rt-users mailing list