[GRASSLIST:1264] permissions (continued)

[Roger S. Miller]

Folks,

I earlier posted a couple questions about problems getting the right
permissions on my grass 5beta10 installation.  Hopefully no one wasted too
much time answering my questions.

My startup problem -- with the init program apparently trying to create a
lock file in / -- was fairly easy to figure out.  It actually was trying
to create the file $HOME/.gislock5.  Apparently the "newgrp" command
clears the $HOME environment variable.  I used newgrp to switch to the gis
group, then started grass.  $HOME was null when I started grass so it
tried opening the lock file as /.gislock5.  Not great behavior, but not a
serious problem either.

A somewhat more serious problem (to me, anyway) is that it appears
impossible to run grass in a workgroup environment.  Grass requires that
the user ID associated with the mapset must be the same as both the real
and effective uid of the process.

Is there any way around the restrictions?

I will go ahead a study the programming manual (which is downloading as I
type).  I studied the code a bit and found that I could easily modify the
G__mapset_permissions code to allow operations if the user has read-write
access to the mapset.  The second problem I came across was that by
default grass creates files with rw-r--r-- access, and I need them created
with rw-rw-r-- access.  I found two places (in gisinit.c and in Init.sh)
where I can change the umask from 022 to 002. Are there other places where
I need to make that change? Or better ways to do it?

And perhaps more importantly, is there any chance that the necessary
changes could be incorporated in the code - perhaps as an option in
configure?  Or if I make these changes will I have to maintain those code
segments myself?

Oh yeah, I didn't stumble across an answer to my second problem, so I
still wonder if there are any problems with two user's accessing two
different mapsets from the same grass installation at the same time.


Roger Miller
Lee Wilson and Associates