On 04/01/2012 04:49 AM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:56:34 -0700, Chris Stratton wrote:
On Wednesday, March 28, 2012 6:38:49 PM UTC-4, Hendrik Boom wrote:
Instead of a user-id belonging to a human user, a user-id belong to an
application. So even if they implemented "~" as a home directory
(which they may well do), it wouldn't deal with my case.
The more significant consequence of this is that because each app is
generally it's own userid, there are a lot of mechanism in place to
allow specific sharing across userids for the benefit of the human.
That would have to be seriously rethought before the device could have
two humans with different access rights to content. Or leaving alone
rights, even different default responses. You want to share that on
facebook? On who's facebook?
I'm not far enough into the development documentation yet, but presumably
each app has its own home directory, or something like it, where it
stores its temporary and persistent files. Since user=specific data are
there, the app would have to know how to distinguish between user-
specific and non-specific data. Or android itself would have to make
that distinction for it, and each user-app pair would effectively have to
have its own user id. Perhaps an app could then be a group?
This might have been possible from start, at the beginning of time, bu I
suspect retrofitting all the existing android apps for this might well be
too much for the ecosystem.
At the beginning of time, Android was Linux and used userid for
differentiating between different users as opposed to different apps.
The designers of Android decided Android to be a single-user device and
dropped the support for multiuser.
I guess if this was to be fixed in the future, we would have to
dissociate between user-id and permission-id, i.e. to no longer using
the user-id for authorisation (this is partially done in normal Linux
with the distinction between real user id and effective user id). This
would be a huge incompatible change, which would be incompatible with POSIX.
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