Failed to set gid privileges

[David Collier-Brown]

Peter Samuelson wrote:
> Point here is, unlike Solaris, the Linux kernel release is not at all
> tied to the libc release.  They are put out by two different groups of
> people, distributed together by third parties (the distributions), and
> often end up quite "mismatched", chronologically speaking, for any
> given end-user.  The trend in libc development is to try to incorporate
> new kernel features (i.e. new syscalls) as soon as possible, but to
> fail gracefully (either ENOSYS or some sort of emulation) if a
> particular syscall is not available at runtime.  Because you can't
> assume a particular kernel at compile time.

	Oy veh!
	[Sound of intemperate cursing elided (;-)]

	This is an honest attempt to deal with a
	problem, but one which just shifts the problem
	from the sysadmin to the application programmer...
	which is arguably dumb, as the application can't
	know about all possible OS problems and protect
	itself from them.

	Even **paranoid** application programmers just
	check the known set of errno values, and ignore
	the ones which can't happen. So libraries
	which return ENOSYS when it's unexpected aren't
	any better than ones which return errors at
	load time... they just crash in mid-operation.

	This is dangerous enough in Samba, and utterly 
	destructive in editors...

	Edsel/Peter: can one check versions explicitly
	at run-time and exit if you find you're using a
	library which is too old?

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | and astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
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