Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] Access Control Lists for tmpfs and /dev/pts

[Catalin Patulea]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 17:55, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 05:13:40PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > > Here is a set of three patches which implement some general
> > > infrastructure and on top of that, acls for tmpfs and /dev/pts files.
> >
> > Why would you want ACLs on /dev/pts?
>
> That's actually a good question. The patch allows to give several people
> access to the same terminal, which sometimes comes in handy with tools
> like screen (at least in its current version), and that's what the patch
> originally was meant for. I've just talked this over this with one of
> the maintainers though, and there are probably better ways than handling
> this at the file permission level, like passing open file descriptors
> between processes. So unless somebody comes up with a convincing
> application, that patch probably should stay out.
Aside from the above reason, I believe the mechanism behind the write 
command should also be considered. The notifications generated by write 
can currently be enabled and disabled only through an "all-on" or 
"all-off" mechanism - it doesn't leave room for user- or group-specific 
permissions because it's based on the mode of the TTY special file.

ACL support in devpts would allow much more fine-grained control of who 
is allowed and who is denied access to writing messages on your terminal.
This would come in very handy and I personally believe it should be 
possible to have such control.

Sorry for the random post and thanks for considering this reason,
Catalin Patulea
> Cheers,
> --
> Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@xxxxxxx>
> SUSE Labs, SUSE LINUX GMBH
>
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Catalin Patulea       VV Volunteer 2002,3
http://vv.carleton.ca/~cat/  VV HI 2004,5
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