Re: is KERNEL developement finished, yet ???

From: Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Date: Thu Dec 05 2002 - 13:07:22 EST


In article <000901c29c5d$6d194760$2e833841@joe>,
Joseph D. Wagner <wagnerjd@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>Unix (and Linux) developers are far too concerned with clinging to the
>30-year-old outdated POSIX standard, which creates numerous problems when
>trying to advance new features.

No.

Only stupid people think they should throw away old proven concepts.
What happens quite often in academia in particular is that you find a
problem you want to fix, and you re-design the whole system around your
fix.

This is how we get crap like microkernels. They have "an agenda", and
that's the _worst_ thing you can have when designing software. You
fixate on some perceived problem, and the end result is that yes, maybe
you fixed _that_ problem, but in the meantime you also generated a whole
new of issues - usually things that were solved by the original
approach.

The UNIX/Linux approach is a very pragmatic thing - leave the things
that work well alone. There's no point in re-inventing the whole system
just because of some small perceived flaws.

>This is not a design flaw per say, but let's face it: Unix would be a lot
>more secure (and more flexible in it's security) with ACL's.
>
>Microsoft Windows has had ACL's since 1991 (Windows NT 3.5?); that was 11
>years ago.

Yeah, and look how much more secure it is than UNIX.

                Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Dec 07 2002 - 22:00:23 EST