Re: [Acl-devel] Man page patch for setfacl

[Andreas Grünbacher]

2018-01-22 17:16 GMT+01:00 Michael Orlitzky <address@hidden>:
> On 01/22/2018 10:48 AM, Andreas Grünbacher wrote:
>> Take a look at the chown and chgrp utilities, which behave the same
>> way as setfacl does today. There's nothing wrong with that.
>
> Are you sure? I haven't tested, but this page suggests that a numeric
> username will be looked-up and not interpreted as a uid unless you
> prefix it with a '+':

This is all rather ugly.

That piece of documentation seems to predate coreutils-8.27 from March
2017 but coreutils 8.27 does treat numbers as IDs in chown and chgrp.
However, the current coreutils repository (post-8.29) does behave as
documented.

> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Disambiguating-names-and-IDs.html
>
> (So if chown treats them as a uid, it's a bug.)
>
>> If you create all-numeric user names, you deserve all the troubles
>> you've been asking for.
>
> Do I still deserve to suffer if I'm trying to fix a mistake that someone
> else made 15 years ago and that I've been called in to fix?

So if change the behavior of setfacl to match current coreutils,
should getfacl be changed to prefix numeric IDs with + signs as well?
I doubt it -- setfacl would be happy, but other tools might break. So
then that needs to be documented as well.

Andreas