Re: Package questions
Hi,
On Sun, Mar 12, 2000 at 02:21:26AM -0800, Gregory Ade wrote:
> I take it that these niceties have to be
> downloaded from the debian package ftp sites?
Yes.
> is there a list that someone may have put together of what needs to be
> installed yet to actually do something usefull with a Hurd system?
Whatever you need to make it usable for you. dselect can offer a list when
the packages file gets updated (start dselect, then access, update, select.
You need a network or a local mirror to make this work).
> (I
> consider things like telnet, the berkeley r-commands, and vi or vim to be
> necessary. =)
It's your choice to install them. They are not essential to make it possible
to install further packages, so they are not in the base (the base is > 12 MB,
big enough for an initial installation).
> Also, I've seen it mentioned in passing here on the lists, but why,
> exactly, is /usr symlinked to the current directory?
Because introducing /usr has obsolete historical reasons, but we can't do
away with /usr/ pathnames in packages, scripts and binaries quickly.
> it seems like a
> patently bad idea to have "/usr -> ."; shouldnt' it be "/usr -> /"?
What's the difference from a users point of view, when you have booted the
Hurd?
There is actually a good reason for a relative pathname: If you mount your
hurd partition on /gnu or somewhere else, using an absolute path will lead
to a wrong /gnu/usr. This is especially dangerous when cross compiling.
> And
> why not have a /usr, anyway? Perhaps it's just my years of having
> "normal" unix systems to grow up in, but I find this quite odd.
The correct question is: Why have /usr? And then realizing that on the Hurd
those reasons are or will become non-issues.
> Also, the concept of a "not-yet-logged-in" user shell is somewhat
> disconcerting to me; any user can cat /etc/passwd without even logging in!
'shadowconfig on'
Or change the permissions of /etc/passwd to restrict it to logged in users.
There is no official way to do this right now, as chmod doesn't have
symbolic tags for these bits, but you can look at bits/stat.h and use octal
values, which will hoefully be parsed by chmod (or write a small program to
do it for you):
/* If the S_IUSEUNK bit is set, then the S_IUNKNOWN bits (see below)
control access for unknown users. If S_IUSEUNK is clear, then unknown
users are treated as "others" for purposes of access control. */
#define S_IUSEUNK 000000400000
/* Mask of protection bits for unknown users (no effective IDs at all). */
#define S_IUNKNOWN 000007000000
> If these questions have already been answered elsewhere, please just point
> me in the right direction.
The debian-hurd mailing list is archived at the Debian web pages, and there
are also Hurd pages worth a read. Some of the answers should be in the FAQ
if they aren't yet (not to myself).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
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