Re: [PATCH] utimensat() non-conformances and fixes [v3]

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 12:49:21PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 01:39:07PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk wrote:
> 
> > > Is there anything else where the file descriptor's access mode allows
> > > doing things on Linux, but the standard requires a permissions check
> > > each time?
> > 
> > Jamie,
> > 
> > I can't think of examples offhand -- but I'm also not quite sure what
> > your question is about.  Could you say a little more?
> 
> "Is anything else equally stupid?", I suspect...  AFAICS, behaviour in
> question is inherited from futimes(2) in one of the *BSD - nothing to
> do about that now (at least 10 years too late).  It's rather inconsistent
> with a lot of things, starting with "why utimes(2) has weaker requirements
> with NULL argument", but we are far too late to fix that.

PS: as far as I can reconstruct what had happened there, they've got
these checks buried directly in ufs_setattr() and its ilk, which worked
for utimes(2), but had bitten them when they tried to do descriptor-based
analog...