Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:43:24 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:43:23 -0500 Received: from almesberger.net ([63.105.73.239]:60935 "EHLO host.almesberger.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:43:22 -0500 Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 18:49:33 -0300 From: Werner Almesberger To: john stultz Cc: lkml Subject: Re: What's left over. Message-ID: <20021031184933.B2599@almesberger.net> References:

<20021031031932.GQ15886@ns> <1036098562.12714.50.camel@cog> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1036098562.12714.50.camel@cog>; from johnstul@us.ibm.com on Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 01:09:21PM -0800 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1718 Lines: 38 [ Cc: trimmed ] john stultz wrote: > groups for each project, I have no clue how anyone would be able to > handle the (unix)group management required. ACLs let the users > themselves manage what people got what access to their data. Note that POSIX ACLs don't seem to solve this either: they only let you control access in terms of existing users or groups. IMHO, this is one of the standard pitfalls of ACLs: if they don't let you aggregate information, you quickly end up with huge ACLs hanging off every file, and each of those ACLs wants to be carefully maintained. I've seen a lot of this in my VMS days. (Unix is a bit better, because you can control access at a directory level, while VMS needs the ACL on each file, because you can open files directly by VMS' equivalent to an inode number, without traversing the directory hierarchy. Of course, many users didn't know that :-) To make ACLs truly scalable, it would be nice to be able to express permissions in terms of access to other filesystem objects. E.g. "everybody who can read file ~me/acls/my_friends can write the directory on which this ACE hangs". This should work like a symlink, i.e. if I add new friends to my_friends, I don't have to update all my ACLs. - Werner -- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina wa@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/