Re: question about contributing

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 8:15 AM, Andreas Metzler <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2015-03-21 Tom Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:
>>    I've been thinking of writing in some support for finding files with
>> ACL's.  I was wondering if there was any interest in this sort of thing.

Yes, someone asks about this occasionally.   Thank you very much Tom
for offering to help with this.

>> If so, would it be better done to just find files that have acl's or to
>> find files that have acl's associated with a particular user or group.  Any
>> thoughts on what the command line should look like
>
>> ex:  find / -acl
>>  or
>>        find / acl <username>
>
>
>> or something along those lines

This is going to need quite a lot of research on your part,
unfortunately.   If we will have a predicate for matching ACLs, it
would very likely be best if we used the same syntax on all platforms.
  That means we need to figure out what ACLs look like on the various
platforms.

There are, obviously, many platforms.   But we should devote more
energy to supporting free platforms (for example the Linux kernel,
*BSD, Illumos, OpenAFS, etc.).   If we can also support major non-free
platforms (commercial Unix or CYGWIN[1], for example) that would be
helpful, though not essential.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that your patches must support all of
these systems immediately, it's just that we need to choose a design
that can, in principle, work for all of those platforms.

[1] CYGWIN is free software but it runs on Windows, which is of course
not free software.

>
>> Also, my first time trying to contribute to an opensource project, I hope
>> I'm approaching the group in the correct manor.

No problems yet!   Though please be aware that for your patch to be
included in Findutils, you will need to assign copyright in your work
to the GNU Project.   I can help you with that process.   It's quite a
simple process, but I'm pointing out now the need for this, since I
would not want you to work for a long time on a patch which I can't
apply when you're done.

> [...]
>
> Hello,
>
> one thing to keep in mind is that FreeBSD's find implementation
> already has an acl switch. It probably would be nice if a GNU find
> -acl option used the same syntax. (The documentation in the BSD
> manpage is not very helpful, though, I have no idea how it works.)

Well, we can start with the assumption that we can use the same syntax
when we look at all the other systems, that could be a time saver.


James.