[gentoo-user] messagebus keeps 0wning my files
I've had this problem for a while now but it's finally driven me mad. I have a directory with some local mercurial repos. I'm the only user who touches these repos. Things will go fine for a while, and suddenly I'll do a commit and then hg will die with abort: Permission denied: on one of the ./hg/* files. When I look at the file I'll find it's owned by 1000:messagebus. So I'm too busy to investigate so I just sudo chown -R $USER:users ~/path/to/repo and go along my way... then the next day—or whenever—the same thing happens again! It's weird because I don't have a user with uid=1000 in /etc/passwd, but messagebus has a gid=1000. Also the seems to only happen to the two Hg repos I am working on. The last time this happened (just now), the mtime on the file is 18 June. The ctime is 19 June (the fs is mounted with noatime). The last time I did the chown thing was on the 20th (so the ctime kinda doesn't make sense, if I understand correctly), so could this possibly be a bug in the fs (ext4)?
Re: [gentoo-user] messagebus keeps 0wning my files [SOLVED]
Well this was interesting... One thing that mercurial does is if you clone a repo and the target directory is on the same filesystem as the source, it create hardlinks of files on the destination for efficiency. Well this is fine, but... One of the things my project does is create a virtual appliance of itself, and how it does that is it creates a chroot, installs gentoo, installs itself, and then copies the chroot to a disk image. Well, this happens on the same filesystem (as root) and in the appliance-making process a user is created in the chroot and also the rep is cloned inside the chroot and chowned to that user. Well the first regular uid is 1000 and since hg clone was making symlinks, my repo got ownership changed to the user inside the chroot :| So the fix is to use hg clone with the --pull option to prevent mercurial from creating hard links.
