[TUHS] History of chown semantics

[Pepe]

On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:00 AM [GMT+1=CET], John Cowan wrote:

> SZIGETI Szabolcs scripsit:
>
> > Well, with the same reasoning, we don't need passwords or protection
> > bits on files, since I can always take a piece of steel pipe and
> > beat the owner, until he gives out the data, so why bother?
>
> More like beating my argument with a pipe than the owner.
>
> > Blocking chown for general users is one level of several controls.
>
> Its specific purpose was to make per-user quotas practical, but since
> per-user quotas are as dead as the dodo, it no longer serves any known
> purpose.

I don't think quotas are dead. It seems nowadays the "preferred" storage
backend for email on Unix/Linux mail servers is Maildir, and Maildir uses
the
filesystem as its own backend, together with the filesystem's quota facility
to give or take storage space to/from mailboxes -- yes, provided the users
are real system users and not "virtual users", but still.

What is "dead as the dodo" is multi-user shell access. But that does not
mean
multi-user shell access should be removed from modern systems, no matter how
dead it may be.


-Pepe.