What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? [LWN.net]

What If I Don't Actually Like My Users?

Posted May 19, 2008 8:32 UTC (Mon) by TBBle (guest, #52146)
In reply to: What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? by nix
Parent article: What If I Don't Actually Like My Users?

> At least gets() is rarely used in 
> free software, although probably not as rarely as seekdir()/telldir(), 
> which I've never even heard of anyone using.

Samba uses it... http://www.vnode.ch/fixing_seekdir

Mind you, I wouldn't have known Samba was using it either (and in fact it took me a little
while to wrap my head around why) before I saw that article.

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What If I Don't Actually Like My Users?

Posted May 19, 2008 19:55 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

So a really quite substantial bug (affecting perhaps 3% of all calls to 
this function in nontrivial directories) persisted for *a quarter of a 
century* before anyone noticed it.

I suspect that seekdir()/telldir() has exactly one user: Samba. Given how 
horrible it makes filesystem implementations, and the closeness of Samba 
implementors to the kernel, I'm not sure that it's worth preserving this 
function for that one user (which is privileged in any case so the usual 
oops-it-might-use-up-too-much-memory arguments against a naive 
entirely-in-VFS implementation do not apply).

Votes to make seekdir()/telldir() root-only, anyone?