[tex-live] umask 022

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sun Mar 8 00:54:12 CET 2009


    2. Running texlive installation under root. In this case I'd assume this 
    is some sort of system wide installation to be used by one or more users.

I agree that is a common use, but I don't think it's a safe assumption.
Some people do installs as root on their own machine for various
reasons, despite our recommendations otherwise.  (In fact, we recommend
never installing as root.)

And general, when root is doing the install, I am even less inclined to
override the umask setting and guess at a *sysadmin*'s intentions.  What
if they wanted 0770?  What if they intentionally wanted 0700 because
they were going to chown it later?  Who knows, could be anything ...

We could put up a warning when installing as root, especially if umask
is not appropriate, but would you have have actually noticed it and
switched your umask?  I'm not sure it's worth it.

Sorry, I'm not seeing a good answer ...

    Keep in mind that rpm package manager (the same applies with deb) would 
    not take umask 077 as a criterion for setting permissions of installed 
    files as this is most probably not what is intended.

rpm and deb can assume they are installing packages to be used by any
user of the current host, since that is their whole purpose.  We can't.


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