Comment 8 for bug 661678

Hi Martin,

 One of our new hires (manager for our PM team) recently installed Ubuntu 10.10. For some, as of yet, undiscovered reason his install has him a member of the 'users' group instead of a per-user group (almost as if USERGROUPS was set to no in /etc/adduser.conf). Whats even more odd is that his per-user group does exist - he just isn't a member of it. His home directory and a number of files + folders underneath of it are owned by '$USER:$USER' but most are owned by '$USER:users'. New files he creates are owned by '$USER:users' thus the reason the chown failed.

 I've spoken with Colin Watson about this and he can't think of any reason to explain this. However, there is clearly some codepath that results in this situation since the original reporter of this bug appears to be in the exact same situation.

 For bzr, is the chown necessary? I'm guessing its to prevent the files being owned by, for example, root if the first invocation of bzr is done via sudo or something? Maybe just silencing the error is appropriate to close out this bug (since clearly the user group stuff isn't a bzr problem) - ie. (assuming my guess was correct), accept the chown as a best effort attempt to provide smoother experience?