[TUHS] History of chown semantics

[Warner Losh]

On Jan 14, 2014, at 3:44 PM, Pepe wrote:

> 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.

Because it really isn't dead. Developers still use it.

Warner