Sender: rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk
Message-ID: <39D71D69.7268DF4F@phekda.freeserve.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 12:18:01 +0100
From: Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
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To: DJGPP workers <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Porting Fileutils 4.0: chgrp, chown, df
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Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

Hello.

I have some questions as part of the Fileutils 4.0 port:

* 'chgrp' fails if the specified group is not the current group
  (e.g. $GROUP). This is the same behaviour as the version from 3.16,
  but I don't think it's very friendly. Since we don't have any real
  concept of user/groups, should it succeed?

    bash-2.04$ echo $GROUP
    root
    bash-2.04$ ./chgrp -v $GROUP /temp/t.t
    group of /temp/t.t retained as root
    bash-2.04$ ./chgrp -v wibble /temp/t.t
    c:/develop/ports/gnu.dev/filutil4.0/src/chgrp: invalid group name \
       `wibble'

  (Last line split)

  I'm in two minds about this. If chgrp succeeds, anything that checks
  that the group has changed will be confused, because the group will
  be reported as $GROUP.

* 'chown' has a slightly different problem. We can modify the user
  and group. The original code has been modified to support
  DJGPP - modified so that it always succeeds, no matter what $USER
  and $GROUP are. Clearly, 'chgrp' and 'chown' should be consistent.

I wonder if some basic user and group support could be added to DJGPP,
e.g. by adding support for the files $DJDIR/etc/passwd and
$DJDIR/etc/group. I'm not sure how useful this would be, given that
there's no easy/nice way to store user, group info for files.

* 'df' needs patching to support joined drives. I could not apply Eli's
  patch for Fileutils 3.16 to the 4.0 sources, because the df code has
  changed a lot. I also do not have access to the join command. Is there
  anyone out there who does? If so, would they be willing to test and
  perhaps debug/fix some code, if I write it?

Thanks, bye, Rich =]

-- 
Richard Dawe
[ mailto:richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com | http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ ]