Am Wed, 18 May 2011 22:30:32 +0100 schrieb Orchid XP v8:

> 
> All Unix tools assume that file permissions are set using bitmasks. If
> this doesn't hold, most software designed for Unix-like operating
> systems simply stops working.

Well, binutils and the file managers of the most used desktop environments 
KDE and Gnome seem to support it. Now what other programs do with it I 
don't know...

> 
> This is the trouble with having a wildly popular system - you can't
> change it. The fact that ACLs are turned off by default almost certainly
> has nothing to do with "people not needing it" - more likely it's turned
> off because it breaks so much stuff.

Well, it wouldn't hurt to turn extended attributes on, even if they would 
get lost using the wrong programs. I think in Ubuntu really a lot of 
stuff is turned off, because people don't need it or they think it is too 
dangerous (like this stupid sudo su stuff and only certain users can 
change to root, which was taken from BSD...).

> 
> Similar problems with file locking. As I understand it, there's now an
> API to ask "is this file locked?", but if you don't use it, you bypass
> all the locking and can access a file even if it's locked. Yeah, that's
> really helpful.

Sure that there is no call for saying "Lock this file definitely" and the 
other lock mechanisms are just kept for POSIX compability?

> 
> I gather that Linux only just got the ability to notify you if a file
> changes. (At least modern Linux desktops manage to *use* this
> information correctly, which is more than Windows Explorer manages...)

I think this is also older... there is this tailf program, which does the 
same as tail -f  but does not poll the file, so I guess there was some 
mechanism already. But I agree, that a lot of the GUI's could implement 
stuff much better.

Post a reply to this message