Re: FUD on my part re: downloading revisions?

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 05:12:23PM -0500, William Case wrote:
> You are not going to believe this; at least I don't believe it.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ;-)

> On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 18:56 +0000, Pete Phillips wrote:
> > Hi William
> > 
> > try my updated version at:
> > 
> > http://www.philfam.co.uk/pete/GTD/org-mode/update-org.sh
> 
> I tried it with the following adjustments:

[snipped]

> The script downloaded things successfully and opened all?? files
> in /home/bill/emacs/lisp/org with a link to org-5.17a
> 
> BUT ... the permissions on the newly created org and org-5.17a
> directories and files where owner = billl and group = games.  'billl' is
> a seldom used extra user account I have added to my system for
> experimenting and playing around with things Linux.  I was most
> definitely not in the 'billl' user account when I used the script.  I
> have no idea how the 'games' group got into the mix.

It's because tar tries to honour the uid/gid metadata when extracting,
but it's done numerically:

$ tar -ztv --numeric-owner -f ~/Desktop/org-5.17a.tar.gz | head
drwxr-xr-x 501/20            0 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/
-rw-r--r-- 501/20       103661 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/ChangeLog
-rw-r--r-- 501/20          617 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/dir
-rw-r--r-- 501/20         6450 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/Makefile
-rw-r--r-- 501/20       396954 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org
-rwxr-xr-x 501/20        52980 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org-export-latex.el
-rw-r--r-- 501/20        21775 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org-install.el
-rw-r--r-- 501/20        38188 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org-mouse.el
-rw-r--r-- 501/20        22162 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org-publish.el
-rw-r--r-- 501/20      1045275 2007-12-20 13:38:42 org-5.17a/org.el

So the extracted files end up with uid 501 and gid 20.  On your system
this corresponds to 'billl' and 'games', which leads me to suspect
that you might be using some kind of Red Hat or derivative, since on
these distributions, uids for normal users start at 500, and 20 is the
games group by default (on SUSE and Debian, they start at 1000, and on
SUSE, games is 40, and on Debian it's 60).

> I have tried using the script to install from both 'bill' ([double] 'l')
> and 'root' with the same result.

Hmm, really?  Like I said, tar *tries* to honour uids/gids, but
if it's not root, it cannot change the uid, and it can only change the
gids to a group which the current user is a member of.  So I would
expect different uids depending on whether you extract as bill or
root, and probably different gids too.

> I would just install from a tarball, but I am still uncertain exactly
> which directory I want to copy to, unzip and make from.  The only 'org'
> file I have is /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/textmodes/org.elc

It doesn't really matter where you install the compiled org.elc to, as
long as it's a directory which is earlier in the `load-path' you've
configured emacs to use than /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/textmodes.  If
you look at the Makefile you'll see the default location that a `make
install' would place the org.elc at:

    # Where local software is found
    prefix=/usr/local

    # Where local lisp files go.
    lispdir = $(prefix)/share/emacs/site-lisp

Look at the emacs manual (C-h r m Lisp Libraries RET) for more
information if you aren't familiar with `load-path'.

> Regards Bill,
> Emacs 22.1.1  Fedora 8_x64 
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ah, look Watson, I was right! ;-)  I didn't see this when writing the
above, promise :-)