umask problem with yum/rpm?

David Jansen jansen at strw.leidenuniv.nl
Tue Oct 7 08:55:35 UTC 2008


Am I missing something, or is this a bug in either yum or rpm (on Fedora
8):

Root's umask is set to 077, so files created by root are by default only
readable by root. Safest setting, so quite ok.
Now root runs an rpm or yum command to install or update files. Umask
setting is not used for the files extracted from the rpm, those get the
permissions as stored inside the package. But root's umask appears to be
in effect for the scripts that run from the rpm.

Most notably: various files in /usr/share/mime become inaccessibel to
normal users after root manually installs updates. Similarly, after the
last update of tetex, files like /usr/share/texmf/ls-R were only
readable for root.

Updates installed through the cron jobs, yum-updatesd, don't seem to
suffer from this problem.

If I explicitly execute 'umask 022; yum upgrade', there is no
problem. So I think this is a bug in yum/rpm.

Actually, I have been having problems with files like those in
/usr/share/mime for a long time, probably since Fedora 8 came out, I
just never correlated the problem to the way the updates were installed
until now.

On Fedora 9, I have not been able to reproduce the problem, even though
the umask settings are the same. 

So, should I report this as a bug, or is it known, or perhaps already
solved somehow?

David Jansen




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