Currently, stap errors out on a non-root invocation with just a: ERROR: unable to find either group "stapdev" or group "stapusr" Though documentation pertaining to stapdev and stapusr are part of the stap(1) manpage, IMO it is prudent to spell out a more detailed error message here. Also, would it make sense to automagically create stapdev and stapusr groups during systemtap install?
Created attachment 2223 [details] More descriptive errors on non-root stap invocation Here is a stab at this. This or something along these lines would be good to have.
> Here is a stab at this. This or something along these lines would be good to > have. Looks good. If one can find in e.g. the fedora packaging guidelines information to the effect of creating new groups during .rpm installation, we can plop such code into a new -runtime RPM %post piece.
Created attachment 2224 [details] More descriptive error messages on non-root stap invocation Fixed a couple of typos and added missing punctuation.
Thanks Jim! I've committed Jim's version of the patch into cvs.
Created attachment 2229 [details] create stapusr and stapdev groups if they don't exist Adding it to the normal build process rather than %post would make sense for users who'd want to locally build and install systemtap. How about this totally untested patch to create the stapdev and stapusr groups at install time. I am not too familiar with fiddling with Makefiles, but again, something akin to what this does would be good. (The script snippet is adapted from Tom Callaway's RPM packaging guidelines handout from Foss.in/2007).
Created attachment 2230 [details] Create stapusr stapdev groups if they don't exist already Minor code reorg to accomodate comment in place
(In reply to comment #2) > Looks good. > If one can find in e.g. the fedora packaging guidelines > information to the effect of creating new groups during > .rpm installation, we can plop such code into a new > -runtime RPM %post piece. The fedora packaging guidelines for creating users and groups is located here: <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/UsersAndGroups?highlight=%28Packaging%29> The systemtap spec file already follows the latest fedora packaging guidelines and creates the groups at install time. This functionality was added on 2007-08-14. It is done in the %pre section, like this: %pre getent group stapdev >/dev/null || groupadd -r stapdev getent group stapusr >/dev/null || groupadd -r stapusr exit 0 However, after thinking about it. This needs to be done for the systemtap-runtime rpm, not the main systemtap rpm. So, the %pre section has been moved to the systemtap-runtime rpm.
Thanks Dave
(In reply to comment #6) > Created an attachment (id=2230) > Create stapusr stapdev groups if they don't exist already > Minor code reorg to accomodate comment in place (For the record, it does not sound like a good idea to me for "make install" to try to create system users. Let's leave that to the packaging system, as the committed patch does.)