On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 12:32:30AM -0400, Jan Harkes wrote:
> 
> Maybe Coda should always return a fixed userid in a file's attributes
> similar to the fixed groupid (65535 or something) we already have. But
> sadly a lot of installers (rpm/dpkg/install.sh) tend to fail when we
> don't appear to listen at least a little to chmod/chown syscalls.

It is no problem to "make install" for most software packages.
Some do insist on running as root :) but it has been always a shell script
easily modifiable to skip that check...
Same about failing chmod/chown.

In any case, if there is a problem with an installer, it is its bug,
or featurelessness. Coda semantics is quite powerful and very adequate,
but incompatible with Unix auhorization model.
If an installer depends on mode bits, the program will most probably
malfunction (probably in subtle ways) on non-local filesystems...

I can ensure - you do not want to use rpm or dpkg to install stuff
on Coda - they heavily rely on host-local directories like /var /usr /etc...
You will not be able to use your programs globally, as Coda otherwise
allows.

To conclude, as Jan pointed out, there can't be a notion of an
"unixish" uid or gid in a global sence.
There can be uuids or otherwise globally unique identifyiers
but they are incompatible with Unix allocated-by-host-administrator uids.

Regards,
--
Ivan