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Date:      Wed, 16 Oct 2002 09:03:47 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, "Danny J. Zerkel" <dzerkel@columbus.rr.com>, "Vladimir B. Grebenschikov,Moscow,408-7227,123-4567,Some-info" <vova@express.ru>, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: short uid/gid
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1021016084509.36711I-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20021016093048.GB10908@vega.vega.com>

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On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Maxim Sobolev wrote:

> What about source-level compatibility, which IMO is a good thing, at
> least if it doesn't add too much complexity (it clearly doesn't in this
> case)? Also, handling single flag should be easier from the coding
> perspective than a load of new values, after all we can do something
> like: 

I'm not convinced there's any value to providing the backward
compatibility that has to be asked for: the only benefit to the current
short-based API is that it allow serious security holes while not
following the standard API offered by other platforms (except Linux).
Freshly compiled applications should be using the proper types to
represent uid's and gid's -- if they're not doing that in the existing
code, they'll get truncated to the right size for "bug compatibility".  If
they are using the correct size, they'll work correctly.  To be able to
run properly on other platforms (vis Solaris), they already should be
using those types.

And it's not like the approach you've described makes it any easier to
implement: you still have to break out the old and new structures since
changing ipc_perm breaks the ABI for all of the System V interfaces,
rewrite the kernel code, etc. You might as well have added the
compatibility system calls since you still have to do all the mapping.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories



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