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Re: chown(2) vs lchown(2) and application breakage



On 25 May 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

> 	I may be missing something basic, but this seems to imply that
>  dpkg breaks on newer kernels; but (for i386 at least) the breakage
>  was for a few 2.1.8x kernels; the newer 2.1.9x and 2.1.10X kernels
>  and dpkg work well together. 
> 
> 	If I recall correctly (and I could be wrong here); 2.1.8x
>  kernels broke POSIX semantics; and the new kernels unbroke 'em?

A bunch of us looked at this very carefully and decided that posix was
pretty ambiguous. I personally feel that the LACK of lchown in posix means
that chown has to operate on the link and not what is pointed to. If that
were not true then all links would be owned by root on a posix system. Of
course, any system that has lchown does this backwards (BSD) :> The best
would have been if lchown ment operate on the link and chown ment operate
on the file.. but it doesn't.. 
 
Jason


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