[Adduser-devel] Bug#643559: adduser with personal groups should make home directory g+s

[Ian Jackson]

I wrote:
> May I ask why not ?  I thought I had provided a clear enough
> explanation of the reasoning, and the change is otherwise harmless,
> but I'd be happy to go into it further.

Looking into this further, I found this in adduser.conf:

  # If SETGID_HOME is "yes" home directories for users with their own
  # group the setgid bit will be set. This was the default for
  # versions << 3.13 of adduser. Because it has some bad side effects we
  # no longer do this per default. If you want it nevertheless you can
  # still set it here.
  SETGID_HOME=no

So my first observation is actually that I'm asking for SETGID_HOME's
default to be changed to "yes".

The second is that there is this rather fuddish comment about "some
bad side effects".  I did web search to try to find out what those bad
side effects might be, and I found this:
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=64806

Those "bad side-effects", if they were ever relevant and important
enough to make personal groups not work properly, have now been fixed.
I have been developing Debian packages on systems with g+s home
directories since around 1993.

Debian's adduser did the right thing by default from 1997 to 2000.
I'd like it to do the right thing again.

Ian.