On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, at 10:55am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I don't disagree with any of that, I was merely stating that it's an > amusing read.
You forget there is a real person on the other end of it. I have been the object of that kind of abuse too many times to find it amusing. :-( > Which ones are you referring to? In the "RH does not do things the way > Derek expects them to be" category, I'd re-word that as "RH does not do > things the way most sysadmins expect things to be." I would answer that question, but I suspect the discussion would quickly turn into a pointless argument over design decisions. Do we really need to re-invent the whole BSD-vs-SysV war with new players? > ... espoused by Evi Nemeth, et al, in the UNIX/Linux System > Administrator's Handbook series. RH violates these basic practices with > their configurations many times. Heh. My take on the same thing was that USAH didn't "get" many things about Linux and GNU. :-) The biggest being: GNU's Not Unix. There are times where Red Hat (and others) have decided not to perpetuate certain braindamages from traditional Unix. I, for one, am thankful for that in many cases. Yes, it sometimes causes older software to break. The answer is to fix the software. A good example is the whole /var/spool/mail thing. Historical Unix made that directory world writable with the sticky bit set. The major reason for that was locking -- programs created lock files in that directory to reserve write access to a mailbox. Of course, it is also a rather big security exposure, especially on a large, multi-user system. Red Hat went to the trouble of making sure all the mail programs on their system use kernel-level locking (flock/fcntl), eliminating the need for that long-standing braindamage. And I say: Good! Just because Unix has been stupid about this for twenty years does not mean we should continue to be stupid about it. World writable directories are bad idea, and many (myself included) consider Unix's dependence on them a design flaw. Sorry if that rains on your parade, but as the Perl folks say, TIMTOWTDI. Nobody is forcing you to use Red Hat. I am sure there is a Linux distribution out there designed to emulate crufty old Unix as closely as possible. :-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
