On 2020-08-03 15:46, Robert Haas wrote:
However, if people are used to being able to deposit stuff in /usr/bin and you tell them that they now can't (because the permissions will henceforth be drwxr-xr-x or the directly won't exist at all) then some of them are going to complain. I don't know what to do about that: it's a straightforward trade-off between security and backward compatibility, and you can't have both.
File system conventions, permissions, and restrictions have been changed many times in the history of Unix, Linux, and the like. Recent examples are /usr/bin and /bin unification and that /tmp is changing to a per-user mount. There are of course always a few complaints and some breakage, but generally this has been going well and is usually appreciated overall.
The important things in my mind are that you keep an easy onboarding experience (you can do SQL things without having to create and unlock a bunch of things first) and that advanced users can do the things they want to do *somehow*.
As an example, per-user /tmp is not hardcoded into the kernel, it's just a run-time configuration. If you want it to behave differently, you can set that up.
-- Peter Eisentraut http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
