From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 02:53:34 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 02:53:24 -0500 Received: from femail30.sdc1.sfba.home.com ([24.254.60.20]:32435 "EHLO femail30.sdc1.sfba.home.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 12 Nov 2001 02:53:05 -0500 Message-ID: <3BEF7FD8.D9FFB716@home.com> Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 23:52:56 -0800 From: Nicholas Miell X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.13-ac4 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Linux ACL designe - why the POSIX draft? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org With all the recent discussion about ACLs and Linux on linux-kernel, I was wondering why the ACL implementations for Linux are based off the withdrawn POSIX 1003.1e draft 17? Is there any particular reason why this was chosen for the basis for the Linux ACL system, besides the fact that its what everybody else did? (It is a only a withdrawn draft after all, there's no reason to actually follow it...) Wouldn't a more flexible solution, perhaps one based on the NFSv4 ACL design[1] be better? Because the NFSv4 design is in effect a superset of the POSIX 1003.1e draft functionality, all Unix filesystems with ACLs could be easily supported by the Linux VFS, and the task of implementing NFSv4, NTFS, and SMB would be made easier[2] because of it. Thanks, Nicholas [1] Actually, it was the Windows NT/2000/XP design first... [2] The VFS would still need some means of mapping the SIDs used by SMB and NTFS and the UTF-8 strings used by NFSv4 to usable uid_t's and gid_t's, but at least the ACLs would be easy.