[Labs-l] Your primary group ID on labs

[Andrew Bogott]

tl;dr:  I just changed a bunch of users from primary gid 550 to primary 
gid 500, and then added them as members to group 550.  This should be 
unnoticeable to those of you who were already happy, and should fix a 
few odd file-permission issues that some of you were seeing.  If, on the 
contrary, anyone sees /new/ problems with file permissions, please 
respond to this email.

For reference:  https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63028


Full (still not all that long) explanation:

Back in the early days of labs, a bunch of user accounts were migrated 
from svn using scripts that differed from the current web-based system.  
For reasons unclear to me, the modern account creation tools add users 
to the 'wikidev' group, number 500, but the old, migrated users landed 
in the 'svn' group, 550.  For the most part this didn't matter, but 
lately we've been running into a few cases (mostly involving betalabs) 
where that diversity of group id causes weird issues with file sharing 
and permissions.

Since wikidev users outnumber svn users by 5:1, I've just moved everyone 
into wikidev.  There remains a vestigial 'svn' group, and all of the old 
svn users are now honorary members of that group. This will permit 
everyone to continue reading and writing to their old files -- the 
change is that /new/ files will generally belong to wikidev.  (That last 
sentence is subject to multiple disclaimers having to do with parent 
directory, default bitmask, etc, but it's a good starting point.)