A question about groups

[Tom H]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 6:02 PM Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 2020-04-05 at 17:32 +0200, Tom H wrote:


>> I don't get this message in my homedir even though it isn't writable
>> by "_apt". I suspect that the error message is wrong or
>> incomplete/misleading.
>
> You may be right. I *do* get the error message in my home directory,
> but I do *not* get it in /tmp. Im running 16.04LTS. To me it's odd
> that you (th) own /home; on my system /home is owned by root. Not
> that this has any bearing on the current situation (I think).

I must've set the "/home/th" mode post-install because I installed
everything on "/" and then carved out "/home" a week or a month later.
Sorry.

I've never read this warning message properly and therefore never
understood it! Sorry.

"Download is performed unsandboxed as root as file 'mplayer_1.3.0-8.dsc'
couldn't be accessed by user '_apt'. - pkgAcquire::Run (13: Permission
denied)"

So it's a warning that apt tried to drop privileges in order to
download a package, binary or source, but was unable to do so because
"_apt" cannot write to the working directory. It seems from the
difference between my case and yours that if this directory isn't
owned by root, the warning isn't displayed.

You can also use "apt-get install -d mksh" to download the mksh deb to
"/var/cache/apt/archives/". Not quite as practical, but now warning :)

It's basically better to be in "/tmp" or in a dedicated directory
that's rw for "_apt".


> Also don't know if apt-get download is doing the same things as apt
> source. Probably.
>
> At any rate, from what I can read this seems to be a warning not an
> error, so possibly not a practical problem?