Fedora 11: moving to posix file capabilities?

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 20:25 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Steve Grubb wrote:
> 
> > On Wednesday 29 October 2008 06:37:32 Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >> We have kernel support for storing capabilities on filesystem since 2.6.24
> >> and recent libcap, both in F9 already.
> >
> > And we have also been busy updating everything else to support this:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449984
> 
> Ah, thanks for the pointer.
> 
> >
> >> I just committed file capability support to rpm.org HEAD, filling in the
> >> final(?) missing piece. Capability support is not going to be in rpm 4.6.0
> >> but no reason they can't be pulled into 4.6.1 which is easily in F11
> >> timeframe.
> >
> > We tried to support this in F-10 by having a test run with ping. We figured
> > that is a simple well defined app that could be used as a test subject. We
> > opened bz 455713 to document the change over. Turns out that people compile
> > their own kernels and do not necessarily turn this on. So, what do we do in
> > that case?
> 
> People compiling their own kernels can hose their systems more 
> dramatically than this...
> 
> >
> >> Are we ready to start considering moving away from SUID bits to
> >> capabilities, in Fedora 11 maybe?
> >
> > We tried and got turned back. How does rpm work on kernels that do not support
> > file capabilities? I'd like to see us get past the initial objections so that
> > we can start removing some of the setuid bits.
> 
> Right now, installation of a package using capabilities will fail entirely 
> if kernel/filesystem doesn't support setting capabilities. Packages with 
> capabilities in them require rpmlib(FileCaps) feature, which rpm currently 
> provides if built with libcap support. It could (and probably should, 
> anyway) be made into a run-time tested feature, so that you'll get 
> something like this if running on kernel with no capability support:
> 
> error: Failed dependencies:
>  	rpmlib(FileCaps) <= 4.6.1-1 is needed by ...

Except nothing really watches those rpmlib() deps much at all, does it?

-sv