Who should be owner of Drupal, Module, Theme folders?

I am finding that I have a variety of owners in the folders under the drupal folder on my local Linux machine depending on who the user was that expanded the module. Most are root, however. Is there a best practice for assigning the user/group names.

I am thinking that perhaps the problem we are having with permissions is related to drupal or the module not having rights when the owner/group is root. This is forcing us to set everything to 777 which I don't think is the best approach.

I am thinking that it would be better to have some consistent user/group, but then how would you inform drupal or make drupal that owner or a member of that group?

Thanks for any assistance.