[PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6]

[J. Bruce Fields]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 12:19:00PM -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 09:06:28PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > 
> > On Friday 2010-08-13 19:54, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > >On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 08:54:32AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > >> On Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 06:05:01AM -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > >> > We don't need to ape Windows in everything.
> > >> > The coming ACL disaster will show that (we will go from an ACL
> > >> > model that is slightly too complex to use, to one that is impossibly
> > >> > complex to use :-).
> > >> 
> > >> Care to elaborate?
> > >
> > >POSIX ACLs -> RichACLs (NT-style). Not criticising Andreas here,
> > >people are asking for this. But Windows ACLs are a nightmare
> > >beyond human comprehension :-). In the "too complex to be
> > >usable" camp.
> > 
> > Well, for one, ACLs in NT can be recursive IIRC. You can't say that of Linux
> > ACLs - instead you have to setfacl -R and setfacl -Rd to give one user access
> > to a directory and all its subdirs including future new inodes.
> 
> You do realize that Windows does exactly the same thing under
> the covers, right ? Watch SMB or SMB2 traffic between a client
> and Windows server when someone changes an ACL sometime :-).

Yeah.  There's some explanation here:

	http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5661#section-6.4.3.2

What NT-style ACLs provide is a few bits that help a setfacl-like
application decide how to propagate the change.  But it's still up to
the application to do the recursive traversal.

--b.