Richard L. Hamilton writes: > pro: not only backups, but bulk file indexers, and perhaps similar as yet > unidentified services, might have legitimate use for keeping atime > unaltered while reading the files, both for performance, and because their > accessing of all files e.g. under a user's home directory actually _loses_ > useful information (what good does it do to know that all the files one > of these utilities read were read within a few minutes of one another, > compared with the utility of knowing the last times the user more explicitly > accessed some of their files?). And one view of least privilege says that
I'd think that such a utility could cache the lstat() values and use those to determine whether it needs to look at the file at all. That'd produce a one-time 'hit' where the first invocation of this indexer may cause a read everywhere, but then not otherwise. (Besides, given the complexity of a "good" file indexer, it seems to me unlikely that the program would be able to make good use of it. I'd expect such a thing to have plug-in utilities for identifying and generating suitable icons for "foreign" files, and with that, there goes your no-atime-change rule.) Encouraging the use of this flag outside of some very narrow constructs seems like a mistake to me, especially when there are at least plausible (and portable) design alternatives. > The only things I can see against introducing a new privilege are: > * additional complexity Yep. That looks like an important one to me. Having a profusion of privileges can make the system harder to understand ... which may well make it less secure, not more so. In this case, it seems like we're having a hard time assessing whether this is something that an ordinary user ought to be able to do. What hope does an administrator, who certainly understands his requirements and users but does not normally get involved in making OS design decisions, have in evaluating it? -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
