"I do not think that word means what you think it does"

[serinde]

A vanilla install of OS X Server gives you an admin user (who is not root). This user's vanilla primary group is GID 20, which is group "staff", which is named "Users". You cannot change that group's name(s) without causing some glorious breakage (or else knowing a lot more than I do at present).

o_O

Now maybe (or even probably) I'm just an artifact of But We Always Did Things *This* Way, and I know I'm weaker than I ought to be on sysadmin theory; but it seems to my undereducated brane that 1) you would differentiate between a group that is "staff", i.e. people who are of some degree of elevated privilege, and "all users"; and 2) you would not want your very very privileged user's native group to be the most hoi polloi-ish of your extant options.

There is logic and reason here, it just isn't what I'm used to, and it will probably cost me some time and effort to wrap my head around it. (I found sweh's comparison to djbware very en pointe--though in that case I understood it, and just didn't LIKE it. Also I find DJB much more irritating than Apple.)

Comments

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

I don't get it. Group "staff" is named "Users"? Isn't it named ... "staff"?

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Its "Short Name" (and what appears in /etc/group) is "staff".
Its "Name" is "Users".

This seems to be analogous to the "short name" and "name" of a regular user account. I have not yet meditated sufficiently on the manual (nor poked around enough) to see the practical functionality of this differentiation, other than that you can make the "Name" to be whatever stupidity you like whereas the "Short Name" is presumably limited by the usual Unixisms.

[spride.livejournal.com]

see below