Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 21:12:47 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Sender: halo1 AT inter DOT net DOT il
To: rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk
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In-reply-to: <39D71D69.7268DF4F@phekda.freeserve.co.uk> (message from Richard
	Dawe on Sun, 01 Oct 2000 12:18:01 +0100)
Subject: Re: Porting Fileutils 4.0: chgrp, chown, df
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> Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 12:18:01 +0100
> From: Richard Dawe <rich AT phekda DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk>
> 
> * '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?

IMHO, yes.

> * '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.

Yes, they should be consistent.

I suggest to look at the ported Tar, as I believe the solution I found
there is much more clean.  The relevant file is lib/userspec.c.  In a
nutshell, if you want the library to ``know'' about a user "foo" and a
group "bar", simply execute these two lines just before the code which
needs that:

      setenv ("USER", "foo", 1);
      setenv ("GROUP", "bar", 1);

> 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.

This looks like an overkill.  The ``solutions'' along the above lines
are working in several ports for many years, and no one has yet
complained.

> * '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?

I have a working DOS 5.0 machine where I can test JOINed drives.