[OpenAFS] Re: coreutils-6.11 released

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Apr 20, 2008, at 14:37 , Russ Allbery wrote:

> Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net> writes:
>> Knowing that, I expect to revert that patch -- unless someone
>> can come up with a very good argument for the new behavior.
>>
>> Out of curiosity, how have you used it?
>
> Usually to tell whether two shells are in different PAGs, which is  
> useful
> when hunting down problems with AFS PAM modules and the like.  Also to
> tell whether a process is in a PAG at all, although with current Linux
> kernels the keyring is the canonical place where that's stored.

Putting on my sysadmin hat, I am somewhat baffled by this  
discussion.  Completely hiding unknown groups?  I would print  
numerically and return a nonzero exit status (the latter possibly  
overrideable for OpenAFS use where they are expected); hiding them  
completely isn't just a way to annoy OpenAFS users, it also hides a  
clue to a system configuration problem (namely, missing groups in the  
group database).

If someone actually needs the hiding behavior, make it an option  
(possibly invokable via an environment variable).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH