Conventions are great! Let's go back to FAT! [LWN.net]

Conventions are great! Let's go back to FAT!

Posted Mar 26, 2009 8:18 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames by clugstj
Parent article: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Most of the things he wants to force on everyone are already available by convention. What is the benefit of disallowing other usages?

What's the benefit of all these ACL's? Traditional Unix permissions, capabilities, POSIX Acls, memory protection, etc. You can just use conventions for that. And if someone violates convention he or she can be fired.

This is you proposal in nutshell - and it just does not work.

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Conventions are great! Let's go back to FAT!

Posted Mar 26, 2009 13:38 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] (2 responses)

Wow, it does not work? Apparently UNIX is completely broken. And ACL's are so complicated and a drain on performance as to be nearly useless - which is why they are not used much.

Shell scripts are where this is the biggest problem. I do shell scripting for a living and don't see this issue as being anywhere near as big a problem as Mr. Wheeler thinks it is.

Also, I'm completely confused by your title. I suggest conventions and then you suggest, perhaps facetiously, FAT (which is not a convention, but enforcement of a very stupidly limited set of possible filenames).

Conventions are great! Let's go back to FAT!

Posted Mar 26, 2009 14:07 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow, it does not work?

Nope.

Apparently UNIX is completely broken.

Nope. UNIX is not broken. Your head, on the other hand, is.

And ACL's are so complicated and a drain on performance as to be nearly useless - which is why they are not used much.

Traditional unix permissions are used on most systems - and are ARE ACL's too. They are quite limited but often adequate - that's why other forms are not used much. Still they are deficient in many situations and other forms are used more and more.

Shell scripts are where this is the biggest problem. I do shell scripting for a living and don't see this issue as being anywhere near as big a problem as Mr. Wheeler thinks it is.

Number of correct scripts is not important metric. Number of bad scripts is. And it's MUCH higher then warranted: I've fixed tons of scripts which failed on names with spaces, files with dash in first position, etc. If such files are excluded from the start life will be much easier.

Also, I'm completely confused by your title. I suggest conventions and then you suggest, perhaps facetiously, FAT (which is not a convention, but enforcement of a very stupidly limited set of possible filenames).

I propose FAT as a way to get rid of these pesky ACLs. It's one of the few filesystems today with any form of access control (except read-only flag). We can extend it to allow all forms of filenames - it's not hard. Or we can just run all programs with UID==0 - it'll give us the same flexibility. Somehow noone wants to go in this direction, though.

Conventions are great! Let's go back to FAT!

Posted Mar 29, 2009 21:44 UTC (Sun) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

"UNIX is not broken. Your head, on the other hand, is"

Wow, childish personal attacks. How droll.

"Number of correct scripts is not important metric. Number of bad scripts is"

I would think that the percentage of each would (possibly) be a useful metric. But, what is the damage from these "bad scripts"? If you are writing shell scripts that MUST be absoutely bullet-proof from bad input, perhaps because they run setuid-root, then you are already making a much worse mistake than the possible bugs in the script.

Still don't understand the FAT reference. Sorry, maybe I'm just slow.