Re: [Acl-devel] Man page patch for setfacl

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 01/22/2018 09:20 AM, Kenneth Dsouza wrote:
> 
> In my humble opinion, it is better to document this behaviour as most
> of the modern distros have stopped the creation of numeric usernames.
> Changing the code is complex and it would break other condition. As we
> will need a new option for the above case.
> 

Let me muddy the waters a bit =)

It looks like the patch is actually correct according to the draft
standard. I don't know if there's an official spin laying around
somewhere, but I found a copy here:

http://wt.tuxomania.net/publications/posix.1e/download/Posix_1003.1e-990310.ps.gz

On page 51, it says,

  If the uid value does not match a user name, then the ACL entry shall
  specify the access permissions granted to the user ID matching the
  numeric uid value.

(And the same thing goes for groups.) So copying coreutils would more
closely follow the standard, at the expense of backwards compatibility.