>>If it is, there's a depth of cleverness in the new Plan 9 >>security model that I had missed until now, namely the elimination of >>the intermediate "superuser" step required by the Unix paradigm. > > indeed that's the point.
Too clever for my ageing brain :-) Of course, I knew the facility existed, but I didn't associate it with the absence of "root" and the elimination of setuid(). I think this type of subtle cleverness should be documented more explicitly, I'm sure I'm not the only one to overlook its ramifications. Like, as another example. the use of groups in Plan 9, together with the group leader: nowhere are there good examples that clarify how different these are from the Unix model. And documenting these principles is not easy: you need to understand them very well. ++L
