Darren J Moffat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There is no such thing as POSIX ACLs. The draft never made it to
> standard. Veritas NetBackup and Legato Networker both use the Solaris
> acl(2) system call to get POSIX draft ACLs from UFS. ZFS and NFSv4 use
> a more modern and much more expressive form of ACLs. The acl(2) system
> call was extended in a compatible way for them, but some backup programs
> assume that acl(2) returning ENOSYS is fatal - in some ways it could be.
> What it actually means in some cases is that the type of argument
> you passed to acl(2) isn't supported by this file system.
Sun did have ACLs in 1994 already, but then theACL system was not really useful
because of feature problems.
Then around Y2000, ACLs became really useful, the POSIX draft was withdrawn
and other OS like FreeBSD, Linux and IRIX started supporting it.
Since August 2001, star supports POSIX ACLs in a platform neutral way that
allows it to become a future POSIX tar extension.
> Both are being fixed, as are other programs such as star.
...
> Sun does not control the release schedule of 3rd party software. Sun
For ACLs and star, I need to say that Sun did make it hard for me to support.
Sun's tar did support ACLs for a long time but in a way that is a vendor unique
POSIX.1-1988 extension and that makes it impossible to ever get standardized by
POSIX. In addition there has been a severe conceptional bug that made it
impossible to use the ACL feature of Sun tar in a senseful way.
Although I files a bug against Sun tar ACL handling in 2001 and altough I did
have a discussion with Jeff Bonwick about ACL support in ZFS and star vs. the
buggy Sun tar in September 2004, Sun did create a Sun tar version what is still
based on the problematic P.1-1988 extensions and that still had the same
conceptional bugs as Sun tar had with UFS ACLs.
In addition, the library to convert ACLs to/from strings was broken the same way
as Sun tar.
This kind of habbit is something that prevents software from outside Sun to
adopt new features early....
Note that the way star supports ACLs has a good chance to be adopted by POSIX
as it cleanly sits on toip of POSIX.1-2001.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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