On Thu, 4 Mar 2021 at 00:33, Ed Greshko ed.greshko@greshko.com wrote:
On 04/03/2021 09:15, George N. White III wrote:
The Changelog at britty.com http://britty.com for the 6.3 release says the systemd component was changed to create the brlapi group if it doesn't exist, so the same functionality as the script. Maybe the change was a response to systems that failed to run the install script. What creates the brltty group?
Seems to me that changelog only applies to the packages supplied by britty.com. At britty.com there includes a brltty-systemd-6.3-1.noarch.rpm which is what I believe is being referenced in the changelog comment.
Systemd changes: The brlapi group is created during boot if it doesn't already exist.
The brltty service file included with that rpm has a size of 2827. Fedora's service file has a size of 217 and comes with brltty-6.3-1.fc34.
The britty.service supplied by britty.com includes a call to /usr/libexec/brltty/systemd-wrapper. That file doesn't exist in the Fedora world. So, I don't think documentation on the brltty site is a faithful mirror of things included in Fedora.
Packages often deviate from upstream configurations, but each deviation can be more work for distro packagers, or less work if they are able to recycle an existing .spec. A basic problem is that distro packagers can't possibly test all use cases for a complicated package like brltty (the remote sensing applications I use are impossible to package due to reliance on particular configurations of third party libraries like hdf4, hdf5, and netcdf4 that vary across distros).
I don't understand your question about what creates the group. The
britty.com rpms don't contain any scripts. I've already mentioned that the packages supplied by Fedora include a PREIN script that creates the group.
The docs mention two groups: brltty and brlapi. I don't expect Fedora packages to keep the britty.com rpm mechanisms, and it isn't a surprise to me that some steps get overlooked (low hanging fruit for Murphy's law)..
[...]
[egreshko@f34k ~]$ grep brlapi /etc/group brlapi:x:979:
So, the install process creates the group. And, of course, users need to be added as needed.
But a step too far for inexperienced users managing their own system.