Re: RCS file ownership?

Adam Thompson <athompso@athompso.net> wrote:

> AFAICT, GNU RCS (v5.9.4, ca. 2015, examined) creates a temp file,
> unlinks the target file, then renames the temp file. I beleve this
> guarantees(-ish, modulo "special" filesystems including NFS and
> FreeBSD's directory-SUID behaviour) that resulting file ownership =
> euid.

mktemp and rename sound like reasonable.

> The GNU docs mention the repo owner in passing a few times but do not
> have a section describing multi-user operation.

The documentation is irrelevant. It should focus on what the code does,
why it seems to do it, and about whether the resulting behaviour is
convenient.

> I'm not sure which other implementations you'd be worried about

All of them.

> - I thought OpenBSD's RCS was the direct descendant of NetBSD's and
> shares common lineage with the other *BSDs?

The top of each source file claims otherwise. It is a rewrite.

> All in all, it looks like RCS and its docs were written in the era
> when UNIX machines were - more or less by universally - used by
> multiple people, and you just had an innate sense of how multi-user
> file ownership would work. Most of my UNIX machines now resemble
> appliances, and exactly zero of them are multi-user in the classical
> sense.

Documentation is irrelevant.