From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Oct 16 6: 4:24 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C87D437B401; Wed, 16 Oct 2002 06:04:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2A7E243E88; Wed, 16 Oct 2002 06:04:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.12.4/8.12.4) with SMTP id g9GD3lOo004743; Wed, 16 Oct 2002 09:03:47 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 09:03:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Maxim Sobolev Cc: Terry Lambert , "Danny J. Zerkel" , "Vladimir B. Grebenschikov,Moscow,408-7227,123-4567,Some-info" , freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: short uid/gid In-Reply-To: <20021016093048.GB10908@vega.vega.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message