From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] fs administration: how do people update multi-user fs?
In-Reply-To: <ba175919a86ab118a27a35fd3ad01474@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0302140818210.1630-100000@carotid.ccs.lanl.gov>
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Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 08:20:16 -0700
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5f02d40a-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Russ Cox wrote:

> (Doing the software packaging I became painfully aware
> of how bad Unix is in this regard.  It was impossible to
> test my installations without su'ing to root.  You'd think
> that some Unix would take the hint and use group permissions
> so that you didn't have to be root to install potentially
> untrusted pieces of software that come with custom build
> scripts.)

A few things I've noticed in recent years, esp. on Linux
- you need to be root more than you used to
- more priveleged ports, not less
- more setuid-root stuff, not less
- code that used to be portable to many systems now has trouble
  compiling on non-Linux systems

Things are going downhill in the OS monoculture.

ron