[Mailman-Developers] Tracking down a permissions bug in attachments

[Robby Griffin]

On Friday, Jan 23, 2004, at 12:27 US/Eastern, Andrew Mellinger wrote:

>   Now, it looks to me like Mailman is trying to set permissions on the 
> newly
> created directory to 02775.  I'm running on NetBSD which doesn't let 
> anyone
> but the superuser set the 2000 (setuid) bit.  I imagine this setting 
> (02775)
> was done for linux which overloads the setuid bit for as 'set group' 
> on new
> files.

man 2 chmod. 02000 is the setgid bit, where 04000 would be setuid. I 
can confirm that NetBSD does let non-superusers set it on files that 
they own (works with /bin/chmod and simple C test programs):

      [EPERM]       The effective user ID does not match the owner of 
the file
                    and the effective user ID is not the super-user.

As you have probably observed, it's not needed for Mailman to operate 
correctly because new files in BSD tend to inherit group ownership from 
the parent directory anyway.

>   Does this sound like a good assessment?  If so, is there a generic 
> way to
> turn this sort of thing off in a config?  (I searched by couldn't find
> anything.)  Isn't this something that should be handled at build time?

Something like that. This is bug #688751, and again I can confirm that 
it occurs on NetBSD, so with every new release I've just commented out 
three lines in Scrubber.py to avoid shunting messages with attachments. 
I otherwise have no idea where to go with this. The function in 
question works when run in a small test program as a non-superuser...

	--Robby