Hi josch, On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 05:37:38PM +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote: > Quoting Helmut Grohne (2019-08-21 11:21:01) > > a) mmdebstrap should automatically enable fakeroot when it notices that > > it is run unprivileged in chrootless mode and creates a tarball. > > b) There should be a new mode for combining fakeroot and chrootless. > > c) The manual page should tell the user to run mmdebstrap under > > fakeroot. This last option also has the appeal that the user can > > retain the permissions and apply further modifications in the same > > fakeroot session before creating a tarball. > > > > At this point, I'm slightly in favour of c). Let me propose the > > following wording: > > > > When run unprivileged, permissions will generally be wrong even when > > creating a tarball. It is recommended to run mmdebstrap inside > > fakeroot in this case. > > > > What do you think? > > Option c) is not bad but I would like to understand your reasoning for > choosing > it. > > I especially wonder why you didn't pick a). What is its downside? Is there > ever > a situation where one wants to use chrootless mode to create a tarball and > have > the tarball contain non-root permissions? Or is there a reason where one wants > to use chrootless mode to create a tarball but somehow cannot use fakeroot > because of a technical limitation? Or in other words: does there exist a > situation in which one would want to create a tarball with chrootless mode but > like to disable fakeroot?
I think for one thing c) is the easiest to implement. No semantic changes are performed. Then option a) sounds a bit complex. The behaviour depends on whether you create a tarball or not. One thing that makes mmdebstrap slightly difficult to use already is that it behaves subtly different in the various modes and variants and outputs. It's very much unlike LEGO inside already. Then fakeroot (or LD_PRELOAD) has the tendency to break in subtle ways. (A recent example is fakeroot+file+seccomp.) Therefore I'd like to retain a way to disable it when necessary. Getting there is easier with c) than a). In any case, it's only a slight preference. Do whatever feels right here. Helmut
