[distcc] Re: Red Hat packaging patch for 0.15

[Terry Griffin]

> OK, I clicked Reply-All :-)
>
>>distcc creates working files on the slaves, so I'm not sure what your
>> point is here.  The other more complex daemons I mentioned create files
>> as well.
>>
> I think that daemons running under nobody:
> - should not create file, else they should not run under nobody
> - shouldn't care if someone else see/delete/overwrite its files because
> it runs also under nobody.
> I think that squid/apache/distcc shouldn't run under nobody if they
> write files. But if they do, then the problem is not that distcc runs
> under nobody but that *squid/apache* runs under nobody.
>
>>How about creating a "distcc" user if one does not already exist?
>>
> That was the discussion point: don't create a distcc user when running
> rpm installation.
> While?
> - It's hard to remove
> - You don't know which package created/use a certain user
>
> So if distcc.rpm don't create a user, we have the 3 possibilities I
> described.
> -jec
>

In the general case it would be nice if processes running as nobody
would run in a chroot jail. This would prevent the various nobody
processes from stepping on each other's files.

In distccd's case I think this would not be workable because you'd
have to cram so much stuff in to the jail, namely the compiler and all
if its support files. This would be a tough thing for a package to
figure out during the installation, assuming it could even figure
out what compiler(s) you wanted to use.

Terry
-- 
Terry Griffin
Axian Inc.
http://www.axian.com/