Comment 15 for bug 13795

On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 03:26:16PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I wholeheartedly agree and second this proposal. Also, /home should be
> root:root 0755 instead of root:staff 2775; it is only confusing and
> actually does not do anything useful.

Obviously it does: it allows an administrator in the staff group to
install software in /usr/local without having to use root priviledge,
so prevent mistakes that would affect the /usr hierarchy. I don't see
what is confusing here?

This is even documented, see
/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz:

staff

    Allows users to add local modifications to the system (/usr/local, /home)
    without needing root privileges. Compare with group 'adm', which is more
    related to monitoring/security.

Cheers,
--
Bill. <email address hidden>

Imagine a large red swirl here.