Permissions on key directories/files.

[Jim Gettys]

There are a number of files/directories that modern (and non-modern)
X based desktops depend on, and whose presence, ownership and
permissions are critical to proper functioning.

These include:
	/tmp/.X11-unix		(containing the X server's unix 
				domain socket)
	/tmp/.ICE-unix		(containing libICE socket)

I'm sure there are others.  These two are expected to be owned
by root and accessible to everyone, with the sticky bit set on
the directory.  For those of you unaware of them, they are used
to store sockets in well known locations in the file system so
that clients can talk to the X server (Unix domain), or that
applications in your session can chat with each other using
ICE.

Problem statement:

If the ownership and permissions of files/directories like these are
incorrect, various things can fail, and in some cases, you end
up with very mysterious situations where you can't even log in
except as root.

I've observed this in mundane situations like needing to change
the UID/GID of my files, and forgetting to get them changed
appropriately.  They can, in pretty ordinary use, end up not
owned by root, particularly if you switch from startx to use
of {g,k,x}dm.

This instant, if you trigger this situation, you may or may not
have your session fail (in very obscure ways), but are very likely
to trigger a strange 5 second sleep that got put in some years
ago (whilke it is printing an error message you probably never
see) complaining about the ownership/mode of the directories.
We're removing the strange 5 second sleep in libICE
since it adds no value we can see.

But this begs the fundamental question: how to ensure that
directories or files that the desktop depends on are set
correctly on restart (at a minimum) of a login session, so that
these failures don't result in massive headaches in the field
(I once wasted hours on this sort of failure before happening
across the cause of the problem; in my case, it was some
bonobo related file/socket IIRC).

Two more obvious solutions include:
   o to decree that programs that initiate sessions (e.g. startx,
	{g,k,x}dm) know what directories and files are essential
	to correct inter-operation and get them set to a
	correct state.
   o a small helper application that can get invoked at run time
	if files/directories need resetting and are not set
	correctly.
There may be other solutions.

Since I strongly suspect that this problem occurs for other
files and directories on current desktops, I think rather
than just fixing the libICE problem that we should see if we
can come up with one mechanism to kill as many birds as possible
that we can all share.

Either way, we need a standard on how to discover what needs
to be set to what mode that can be shared across different
invocation methods ((e.g. startx, {g,k,x}dm) or if we use
a suid helper application at run time.

Comments?  Suggestions? Alternatives?
                                - Jim

(I opened http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=306
for this problem).

-- 
Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com>
HP Labs, Cambridge Research Laboratory