[TUHS] History of chown semantics

[usotsuki@buric.co (Steve Nickolas)]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014, Chris Nehren wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 21:13:55 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> Larry McVoy scripsit:
>>
>>> But with disk so bloody cheap and VMs working so bloody well, it's pretty
>>> easy to spin up a VM and give it to some idiot who thinks they need root.
>>
>> ./configure or not, it's damned hard to install large amounts of software
>> without root.  You can do it, but it's hard, especially if some of it
>> is really really expensive to build from source, since you're blocked
>> from using the distro's own install tool.
>
> How is this difficult? I've not had any problems that are
> specific to the software not wanting to be installed as non-root.
> You need to know some compiler flags like -R and ./configure
> variables like CFLAGS and LDFLAGS, but other than that I've not
> seen any problems that really stick out in my memory.
>
>> Most people who use Unix today are the only ones there.  Someone should
>> really rewrite finger(1) to do something different.
>
> What do you do that this is the case? I'd literally be out of a
> job if I didn't have a gaggle of users to look after. And so
> would my entire team of coworkers. This is such a bewildering
> claim to me and everyone I know that we can't fathom how it's
> true.
>
>

You'd be surprised.  Over on hoshinet, we actually share Linux and FreeBSD 
servers among each other.  My virtual root has 2 actual users and the 
server it's hosted on has 4 actual users.

-uso.