[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] Messages silently disappearing

Harald Meland Harald.Meland@usit.uio.no
19 Feb 1999 22:29:16 +0100


[Barry A. Warsaw]

> Thanks to Wes Morriston for giving me access to his Linux machine, I
> have diagnosed the problem he and Edward Marshall were having.  I
> don't have a better solution than the one Wes came up with, so I'm
> posting this followup here to see if anybody has any ideas.
> 
> The problem in a nutshell: on some Linux boxes, the effective group id 
> is not preserved across a popen() call.

[...]

> I'm at a loss as to what the right solution is.

I can't really see that there is any viable[1] alternative to putting

  setregid(getegid(), -1);

somewhere in common.c:run_script() [wrapped with appropriate
autoconfisms, of course].

As long as there are systems not preserving the effective GID when
they ought to (IMHO), we'll have to hope that using the real GID will
work better.  And, I don't think that setting the real GID to the
effective GID will cause trouble on other systems.

[1] Starting everything via setgid C wrappers isn't viable (to me).
    Forcing (possibly non-privileged) Mailman users to chgrp their
    directories to groups they very likely aren't members of isn't
    viable (for them).
-- 
Harald