[PATCH] Add user/group support to brackup

[Gavin Carr]

Hi Kostas,

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 07:02:41PM +0200, Kostas Chatzikokolakis wrote:
> On 28/05/10 17:39, Gavin Carr wrote:
> > Brackup currently lacks support for recording and restoring ownership.
> > The attached patches add this functionality, in a similar way to how 
> > modes are stored in the metafile currently. The first patch updates 
> > Brackup::File and Brackup::Backup to capture user and group ownership
> > for all objects in the metafile; the second patch updates 
> > Brackup::Restore to reapply (where possible) the recorded user/group
> > settings.
> 
> That's a nice and needed feature!
> 
> Just one comment: from a quick look at the patch I see that you store
> names, not ids. It would be nice if brackup could also record the
> uid/gid, like tar. Note that a file might have a uid without name in the
> original system, or the name might not exist in the restore system.
> 
> A good solution would be to store ids (which are shorter) for each file
> and also store the id -> name map in the metafile. Then, on restore, we
> can apply the local uid for that name, unless it doesn't exist (or some
> --numeric-owner option is given) in which case we can restore the
> original uid (this is how tar works).
> 
> Kostas
> 
> PS. if a uid has no name then getpwuid returns undef, which might cause
> some warnings in as_rfc822()

Yes, good point, I didn't think about the uid-without-a-name case, should
handle that, although it's presumably fairly uncommon?

In terms of storing uids as well as names, do you think the value is 
worth the extra complexity? I kind of like the simple approach: if the 
user exists on the restoring box, well and good, otherwise just fallback
to using the restoring user, as we've done so far.

Not sure.

Cheers,
Gavin