> The fact remains that this is historical behavior, not something that 
> just appeared.  Why, I think even my old V7 manuals document link(2) and 
> unlink(2) on directories for the superuser...

Broken signals are also historical behaviour, present in V7 and also
in USG versions of Unix.  Should we mimic this behaviour in NetBSD?
Back in V7, as somebody else pointed out, you got a list of files from
a directory by opening the directory with open() and read()ing it.
You could also accidentally trash a directory.  Should we go back to
that behaviour?

There is no less valid justification for continuing to support a bad
interface than that ``that's the way we've always done it.''  Don't
confuse this with ``this will break the world,'' which is often a
consequence of changing an interface.  This latter justification
doesn't apply here.  Furthermore, it has been correctly rejected as an
excuse for fixing broken interfaces in past BSD releases.

			       _MelloN_