[OpenAFS-devel] posix chown again

[Simon Wilkinson]

On 27 Oct 2008, at 15:15, Michael Meffie wrote:
> Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
>> --On Monday, October 20, 2008 09:51:15 AM -0400 Michael Meffie  
>> <mmeffie@sinenomine.net> wrote:
>>> Since the C acl is documented as having no default meaning,
>>> this is conditionally compiled into the fileserver with
>>> the --enable-posix-chown option (disabled by default).
>> As discussed at the recent hackathon, the bit to be used should be  
>> determined at configure time, rather than being hard coded.  This  
>> allows sites that wish to use this feature to map it onto an ACL  
>> bit they are not already using.  Thus, one would have to configure  
>> with an option like --enable-posix-chown=C (with legal values  
>> being [ABCDEFGH] and "no", and maybe even 'a' or 'w', but not "yes").
>
> The attached patch includes the code to set which ACL bit is to
> be used. The configure switch has been changed to --enable-permit- 
> chown-acl
> which can be used to specify which ACL bit is used and defaults
> to disabled.

Please, please, please don't make this configurable. From a user  
experience point of view it's horrific. Having the ACL bit which  
controls this behaviour differ between cells (and even between  
fileservers) will confuse any user who moves between sites, or even  
who reads a different site's documentation when trying to come to  
grips with AFS. It spectacularly violates the principle of least  
surprise.

We should either pick a bit, and make it globally consistent (and  
reserved on those fileservers which don't enable the behaviour), or  
defer this feature until we have more ACL bits to play with.

Cheers,

Simon.