Messages in this thread | | | From | (Bill Spitzak) | Subject | Capabilities | Date | Fri, 21 May 1999 14:38:28 -0700 (PDT) |
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Since I'm not a member of this list, and I'm sure Linus gets lots of mail, I can only hope this might get bounced to somebody who might make sense of my comments and either dismiss them as absurd or something...
Linus's worry about scripts seems to be solvable by adding capabilities to the "header" of the script, just like they are added to the header of the ELF file. This could be done by adding a second line to do this:
#! /bin/sh -foo #! xxyyzzy
where xxyyzzy is the capabilities, in some easily-parsed and unambiguous text form. I would prefer it on the first line, but this way allows the script to be run on non-capability systems.
It seems to me that there are huge advantages with doing this, in that scripts with capabilities can be stored on file systems that don't support them.
If in fact Linux goes with file-system capabilities, it seems to me that this means that information that is only useful for executable files is stored with *every* file (granted the likely implementation will take no space). This would seem to imply that we should look into a system where every file is executable. This would match the Windoze or Mac idea where you can double-click anything and (supposedly) it does something useful. Building the linking of what running a file does into the system (well, probably the exec call in the library) could make shell scripting much more powerful, and remove the need for incompatable and complex code in the UI.
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