From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:45:17 -0700
From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] fuse bashing
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Dave Eckhardt wrote:
>>no ACLs (I'm convinced that the stat and wstat could be trivially
>>extended to support this --- 9p2000.acl)
> 
> 
> I assume ACL semantics would need to be outside the protocol, but
> have you found an ACL system you like? 

I'm not so sure it has to be outside the protocol. We've already 
extended stat/wstat with .u, and it was not that big a deal. The *stat 
packets are a very good design, and I think could be stretched for ACLs.

> The part of AFS I like is that every user can define new groups.
> Once "owner" and "group" can be arbitrary sets of people, it's
> not clear to me that you need more than "owner, group, world".

Data General AOS/VS had a pretty usable ACL scheme. ACLs were simple 
sequences of tuples: (re, permission)+ -- IIRC, it's been 24 years, and 
I can't find that manual -- so, for example, you might have:
(rminnich,readwrite):(sys+, read):(myfriends, readwrite)

and so on.

In practice, everybody did user, group, world, just with re's instead of 
numbers; I think I agree with you. It's too hard to think about much 
else. I didn't say people NEED ACLs, they just WANT ACLs. As I used to 
say to my kids all the time, "You don't need that, you want that". After 
about 10 years, they got my point.

ACLs are the new fad, and they're going in, with silly bugs to boot 
(ACLs have been NOT fun on linux), and I really doubt in the end we'll 
go much beyond user, group, world.

ron