Preserving permissions prototype

[ephess]

Heya,

Sorry about the delay on this, been a busy few weeks at work.

I've got an initial prototype working which seems to avoid using a post install file to set permissions on the files after installation - what do you think of doing things this way?

I would be inclined to set the default owner/group to root and preserve the original file mode - do you agree with this? Currently the owner/group varies depending on whether fpm is run as a regular user or as root.

I then propose we add the 2 options you suggested --owner and --group with '-' for preserving current owner/group.

I do note that this change would only work with director as a source, are you happy with this?

Any feedback you have would be appreciated.

[ephess]

Wondering if you're going to get a chance to look at this soon? I'm going to have to continue work on it in this manner otherwise as I need to move ahead with the project I'll be using this functionality for.

[beddari]

I'm also interested in this.

I think what you suggest ephess is OK other than I'd want preserving current owner/group to be the default, thus no special case for preserving with "-". I'd just use --owner root --group root as needed. In my mind that's simpler.

[ephess]

Although I agree with you that preserving the current permissions by default is more intuitive, it will be changing the way FPM behaves by default quite significantly which in my opinion is not in our best interest as it breaks backwards compatability. If jordansissel is happy to do this then I think it would be the best fix, however it is a rather intrusive change for anyone currently using fpm.

[ephess]

@jordansissel I've come up with a new method of preserving the file permissions using fakeroot, this makes fpm dependant on the fakeroot program however it is a much better way of achieving this in my opinion, it will also be a lot less work to pull this through to other package types (gem, rpm etc) than the previous method.

Looking forward to hearing your comments on this, I'll be rolling a patched version of fpm into production with this change in it so we'll see how we go in the coming weeks.

Once I've got your feedback on it and if you're happy to merge this / want more work done on it I'll tidy it up a bit, it's still very messy at the moment.

[llasram]

FYI, my pull request #217 to preserve file metadata has already been merged, along with a later fix in 823c510 by @jordansissel to handle over-zealous metadata-duplication on hardlinks.

[ephess]

Thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll close this one, I was under the impression that @jordansissel wanted fpm to be able to operate as a non root user otherwise that would have been a much easier fix :/

Cheers for letting me know.

[jordansissel]

I do want fpm to run as non-root, but #217 was a good step anyway since fpm wasn't properly copying things (it copied the files, not necessarily the metadata, but is now fixed).

Properly preserving permissions on the long term will require fpm to track file settings internally anyway, but I'm not sure how to best represent taht without making fpm too complex ;)