Subject: RE: bug#819: 23.0.60; group and owner "Everyone" - what's that about?

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:12:35 -0700

> > emacs -Q
> > Dired on a subdir of, say, c:\
> >  
> > .. has the owner and group listed as "Everyone". What's 
> > that about? If I click `..', I see that none of the files or
> > subdirectories in c:\ belong to "Everyone" (in my case). That
> > "Everyone" artifact is incorrect and misleading.
> 
> You interpret "Everyone" too literally.  "Everyone" is the Windows way
> of attributing a file's ownership to no one in particular.  This is
> what you will see for each and every file on a FAT32 volume, because
> FAT32 does not support file security, only NTFS does.
> 
> So "Everyone" is not an artefact, it's what Windows reports to Emacs
> as the owner and primary group of a file or directory.

In Emacs 23, it's not what I see in Dired for the other files and directories,
besides `..'. In my case, I see my user name as the owner for each entry except
`..', and I see `None' as the group for each entry except `..'.

In Emacs 22, I see my user name as the owner for each entry (including `..') and
`root' as the group for each entry (including `..'). In Emacs 20, I see my user
name as the owner for each entry (including `..') and `5' as the group for each
entry (including `..').

IOW, before Emacs 23, (1) `..' was not treated differently from other entries
and (2) the group was not `None'. Change #2 seems OK to me, but I don't
understand #1: Why should `..' be different? 

And why should following the link `..' show something different from what was
shown for `..' in the subdir? The properties of a given directory should always
appear the same, regardless of where you are viewing them.

> That said, I cannot reproduce this on my machine, with NTFS
> filesystem: each file and directory I see belongs to some valid user
> or group, and in particular all subdirectories of c:\ have
> "Administrators" as the owner of ".." and "SYSTEM" as its primary
> group.  That is what I'd expect on a typical Windows machine with NTFS
> filesystem.

My hard disk is formatted FAT32, not NTFS.

> So what you see is some strange peculiarity of your system, I think.
> Perhaps because you upgraded your filesystem from FAT32?

No. It was and is still FAT32.

> In any case, "Everyone" is a legitimate value of a Windows owner
> and/or primary group of a file.

Whatever is used should be consistent: (1) `..' shouldn't be special, and (2)
`..' should show the same properties (owner group) as what is shown for it when
you follow the `..' link - the directory's properties should not change
depending on where you are looking at them.