[CVALE] musical groups

[Pandora]

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Patrick Bennett wrote:
> It was a purely hypothetical example chosen for, what I thought would 
> be, clarity of purpose.  Sorry to have stepped on your ideological toes. 
> {eye roll}

It's not just my ideology. It's the strategy behind which /etc/group was
designed. If you want to use groups successfully, having an idea what
those groups are and what they were made for is a good idea. They are
independant resources; one may not depend on another.

An example would be if you made a "fruit" group for accessing files
about fruit being sold, then you made a "orange" group for accessing
files about oranges being sold, you would have a problem. Should the
oranges file be in the oranges group, or the fruit group? There is only
room for one group in the file header. More in there would mean slower
file accesses and more wasted time doing something you probably don't
even need to be doing. You could equivalently make two groups "oranges"
and "fruit other than oranges", and put people in those according to
which fruit file they need to access. Or better yet have an "apples"
group and an "oranges" group, because it's really just apples and oranges.

Better to put one person into "apples" and "oranges" than to implement
some sort of multi-group filesystem header and put people into "fruit"
and "oranges". Avoid generalized groups that don't refer to a specific
resource or need.

> The point being, that *obviously* a manager is also a staff member.  

I'd make a group based on what they needed to manage, like maybe
"payroll" or "timecard", and I probably wouldn't bother with a "staff"
group since I wouldn't feel secure enough to have both staff and
non-staff data on the same computer.

> There is a need to allow/deny group access to files and devices, and in 
> many real world cases these groups are *hierarchical*!

Sorry I'm not big on hierarchies. :3

> for instance - and all the stuff that a normal "staff" member has access to.

chmod o+r...

> If your time is so invaluable as to needlessly sort needles from 
> haystacks, because to handle things in a cleaner simpler way would 
> contradict your abstracted principles of technopurity, then I beg you to 
> waste your life.  Please.

Well I sure won't waste it finding ways to exaggerate my debate
partner's stance until I've effectively constructed a sort of straw
dummy or "man" that I can then safely beat up to show everyone how good
my argument is.
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