Reading this bug report and linked material there appears to be the following problem. (NB: I have not had a look at the code or tested these ideas so my analysis may be flawed)
Current flow when cu is started by root user: (A) cu is started by root:root (B) cu changes effective user:group to uucp:root (C) Debian serial ports are owned by root:dialout (D) Therefore cu started by root cannot open serial port! FAIL! So there are 5 possible solutions: (1) change cu so that effective user is root (i.e. drop B above )then can open standard serial port -or- (2) change cu so that effective GROUP is dialout (i.e extend B above to also change group) then can open standard serial port -or- (3) change serial port owner(user) to uucp (fiddle with C above) then standard cu will work for root and users in dialout group -or- (4) change serial port owning GROUP to root (fiddle with C above) then cu will work for root but not users in dialout group -> FAIL! -or- (5) Add the root user to the dialout group OK so (4) is stupid. Changing (3) is also probably silly as we would likely break other things (5) would be a documentation issue but means things don't just work "out of the box" as it were. This may already be in Debian.Readme: I have not looked. (1) might be wise to leave this in incase sysadmin makes cu setuid root and expects standard cu behaviour. Which brings me back to (2) where an extra system call is added next to the one that drops root ownership to drop root-group-ship (if that is a word) leaving effective group as dialout. In conclusion I suspect that some variant of (2) or (5) is the way forward for the Debian package. Regards Alex Owen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
