Re: [PATCH 10/16] hurd: add fsys_get_children

[Richard Braun]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 10:50:51PM +0200, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> I'm not concerned about the mtab implementation.  I'm concerned about
> the RPC's interface.
> 
> I'm not sure why you think chroot is only for compatibility and why we
> therefore shouldn't correctly support it.

First, it's not POSIX. Then, its use depends on everything that requires
proper file system setup to correctly work, which on the Hurd is about
everything since the file system is the directory of practically all
services (but even on other systems, services provided by file systems
are affected). To finish with, this RPC is really intended to implement
mtab, and I don't see why the current behaviour is incorrect.

>From my point of view, this problem raises an important design issue of
the Hurd : in one mail [1], you state translators should never
impersonate users, but here, it really seems necessary to make the
translator temporarily inherit some of the users' properties such as its
file system root. Or, if the translator merely acts as a registry and
redirects users, this probably means the mtab implementation needs to
be part of glibc, which seems to be an impractical way of extending
system functionality ...

-- 
Richard Braun

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-07/msg00214.html