Ownership

Paul Haas paulh at hamjudo.com
Thu Sep 9 14:04:38 GMT 2004


On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Wayne Davison wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:52:51PM -0400, Paul Haas wrote:
>> I can think of 4 usefull modes:
>> 1                    The default, don't try to chown().
>> 2 --owner            If rsync thinks it is root, then try to chown()
>> 3 --owner-whining    Always try to chown() and whine if it doesn't work.
>> 4 --owner-no-whining Always try to chown(), don't whine if it doesn't work.

> Here's a patch that adds mode 3 to the two existing modes (leaving mode
> 4 unimplemented for now).  It forces the user to specify -oo to perform
> chowing even when not root (-ao is not enough), and to specify -gg to
> try to preserve all groups when not root (even if the group wasn't
> returned by the getgroups() call).  For example:

>    rsync -avoogg /src/ host:/dest

> This only works if both sides have this patch applied (otherwise the
> normal -o and -g behavior would apply).

> Thoughts?

It looks good to me.

You might want to add something like:

--- options.c   2004-09-09 09:20:20.000000000 -0400
+++ options.c.new       2004-09-09 09:17:17.000000000 -0400
@@ -250,7 +250,9 @@
    rprintf(F," -H, --hard-links            preserve hard links\n");
    rprintf(F," -p, --perms                 preserve permissions\n");
    rprintf(F," -o, --owner                 preserve owner (root only)\n");
+  rprintf(F," -oo                         attempt to preserve owner (even if not root)\n");
    rprintf(F," -g, --group                 preserve group\n");
+  rprintf(F," -gg                         attempt to preserve group (even if not root)\n");
    rprintf(F," -D, --devices               preserve devices (root only)\n");
    rprintf(F," -t, --times                 preserve times\n");
    rprintf(F," -S, --sparse                handle sparse files efficiently\n");


Note: In a contrived test, rsync didn't do a chmod() after a chown() 
failed.  So those files were left with the mode of the temporary file.  I 
can't think of a real world situation where that matters.

Now the stage is set for someone to create a filesystem with semantics 
that are designed for rsync.  rsync wouldn't need to run as root on the 
system that holds the backups.  FUSE, filesystem in userspace, is a good 
place to start. See http://lwn.net/Articles/68104 for a description. 
Note that an early version of FUSE had a "bug" such that any user could 
chown.  Just call it a feature.

> .. wayne..

--
Paul Haas
paulh at hamjudo.com



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