I am familiar with the workings of the permissions system and find it to 
be quite adequate and well-featured enough to do acl-like things without 
more bloat and modification. i'm watching kernels get bigger and bigger as
people shovel more and more stuff into the kernel instead of doing it in 
userland. A certain amount of this is fine and just the normal march of a
piece of software along the path toward feature-choked, but i'd like to 
see NetBSD not get choked by features in the kernel. 

Isildur

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Lord Isildur wrote:
> > one of the fundamental ideas in the design of UNIX, which i think is 
> > every bit as relevant today as it was in the beginning, is that the UNIX 
> > filesystem does NOT have such compartmentalization and specialization of 
> > files, does NOT have semantic interpretation of files. A very important 
> > concept in UNIX is that files are just an arbitrary sequence of bytes. 
> > The system merely stores them. You can implement ACLs in a userland 
> > solution on top of UNIX, but please dont go putting interpretation of 
> > files into UNIX.
> 
> With this reasoning, the "traditional" permissions would not be
> appropriate for the kernel either. Maybe we're forgetting that Unix is
> supposed to be a multiuser operating system? 
> 
> Maybe you should make yourself familiar with the unix permission system,
> and then you'll understand that ACLs are just an extension to that?
> 
> 
>  - Hubert
> 
> -- 
> Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@informatik.fh-regensburg.de>
> 
>