Failed to set gid privileges
David Collier-Brown
David.Collier-Brown at canada.sun.com
Tue Sep 5 13:36:52 GMT 2000
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
Willowdale, Ontario | //www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/author.html
Work: (905) 415-2849 Home: (416) 223-8968 Email: davecb at canada.sun.com
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