Re: [Evolution] Where does evolution store its files?

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Fri, 2012-01-27 at 06:39 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 21:39 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 13:15 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 13:45 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > > > > Until just now, I didn't know that it was a tar archive.
> > > > > I was going by this:
> > > > > http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.2/backup-restore.html.en
> > > > > If it's just one tar file,
> > > > > I can change permissions on the tar file.
> > > > > A user program really can't do much with the owner informaton in a tar file.
> > > > Quite.  When the tar file is unpacked the ownership of the files will be
> > > > set to the user who unpacked it - no other course of action is possible
> > > > since only the root user can set the ownership of a file to something
> > > > else (and I really hope you aren't running a mail client as root!)
> > > This isn't true;  tar can request to not set the ownership, it can just
> > > extract the files and leave permissions and ownership alone
> > Wrong. A non-root process can *only* create files owned by the user
> > running it, and 'tar' is of course not setuid.
>
> Wrong!  Wait... that's exactly what I said.  You tell tar to NOT restore
> file ownership  - this allows you to restore an archive from one system
> on your new system where you may have a different uidNumber/gidNumber.
> You can do the same thing with not restoring file permissions and/or
> other meta-data.
>
> Otherwise you will get a bunch of errors, or at least warnings, about
> not being able to set file ownership.

Fair enough, then we agree. Your earlier statement implies that if you
don't tell tar not to restore ownership, then it will do so. What you
meant was that it will *try* (and fail).

poc