Re: LEAST SURPRISE
Ian Jackson writes:
>> 4. It violates the principle of least surprise.
> I disagree with this statement. The principle of least surprise
> means that (as much as possible) you get a consistent and known
> result, whatever that result is and no matter where you are.
>
> A filing system with setgid directories would be a strange one to
> navigate. "cd /", and we're in SysV. "cd /usr/src" and we're in
>
> BSD. "cd /usr/spool" and we're in SysV again.
stephen white <stephen.white@adam.com.au> writes:
Sorry. What if you are mounting different partitions? You need to
mount with the BSD option each and every time you mount to have "least
surprise" or whatever.
Humpf. Just change to another directory with the same permissions even
and then get different behavior -- that'll send 'em to c.o.l.help!
I'd rather it was just the default Linux behavior, but it isn't going
to happen. I wish that we didn't have to even think about mucking
around with /etc/group. Anyway, the fact of the matter is that I'm not
even convinced that we want it. We will be getting good benefits, but
the drawbacks are undeniable. My mere question is: if the benefits are
so undeniable, why can't this change occur everywhere and not just
Debian? If the Linux community (or a significant majority) felt that
this is a good change and Linus agreed, could we have a low-level
change in directory semantics? I don't think POSIX defines anything in
this area, but I haven't checked.
Dan
--
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu>
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