[2025-08-04 23:33:15+0100] Sam James:
This lets us avoid suid in many cases and I can't see a reason to not
do it. USE=caps generally means "use libcap (or libcap-ng) to have needed
privileges, rather than suid". sys-libs/libcap is an unconditional dependency
of important packages anyway like sya-apps/openrc, sys-auth/elogind, and
sys-apps/systemd.
There is an argument against filecaps/xattr by default, but we *do*
enable those by default already and we just disable them for stages to
allow portability and unpacking to exotic filesystems.
Prompted by bug #961054 (which was a problem in another regard or two,
but nonetheless reminded us about this).
Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/961054
Signed-off-by: Sam James <[email protected]>
I think it's a bit awkward to enable caps to disable suid,
they are quite different and that means USE=caps can mean granting
additional privileges instead of getting rid of suid.
And it's not just future, like I'm noticing those two from a quick
grep caps profiles/use.local.desc
dev-util/bpftool:caps - Use sys-libs/libcap to enable unprivileged run support
media-tv/kodi:caps - Use sys-libs/libcap to bind to privileged ports as non-root
Instead I think ones like htop should have IUSE=suid, like bubblewrap
does for example.
Best regards
