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From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>
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Subject: Odd ACL question
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In tinkering with libarchive's support for ACLs,
I've run across a head-scratcher:

Joerg Schilling's "star" archives ACLs as follows:

"user::rwx,group::r--,group:mail:rw-:6,mask::rw-,other::r--"

Note the "group:mail:rw-:6" entry that contains a fourth
field with the uid/gid number.  FreeBSD's acl_from_text
chokes on this, although Joerg asserts that posix1e
permits additional fields.

Question: Should acl_from_text be altered to ignore
additional fields?

What I can't quite figure out is whether or not this
uid/gid field is really useful.  It seems like it might
be useful when moving archives across systems, but
I'm not entirely convinced that it's right to restore
the uid if the username doesn't exist.

Question:  Is this a useful extension?

If so, then I need to find a straightforward way
to implement it.  I could maybe add this to our
acl-to-text routines, but that sounds dangerous
somehow.  Alternatively, there might be a way to
refactor our acl-to-text routines so I could reuse
the bulk of the work there.

Any thoughts on the matter are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim Kientzle