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Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

cs.columbia.edu

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Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#141

Post by justinator »

ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #60
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: Almost everyone uses the Apache webserver when they browse the web, but hardly anyone even knows what that is. We could easily compile a long list of similar crucial infrastructure software that virtually everyone is using and that doesn't have graphical user interfaces.

Count sendmail in: > There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

As a suggestion, let's keep the homophobia to a nonexistent level, please.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#142

Post by jstimpfle »

JdeBP wrote: post #82
jstimpfle wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has put ACLs to good use anyway? Even the old model usually forces one to overspecify one's intent. It's too easy to shoot in your foot, and too hard to figure out what you need in the first place. I doubt there is a good general purpose permission model that's more complex than Unix modes. Collaboration on filesystems just doesn't work very well. It could work for many small groups if files had no users associat…

Well, for starters there are every Windows NT system you have ever used, which uses ACLs quite successfully and extensively for a whole host of reasons, and ... me. I put ACLs to good use myself. Your wording, speaking of repositories and git, bespeaks a too-narrow idea of what ACLs can be used for. Aside from all of the examples that one can glean from Windows NT, from window stations to the trusted installer, there…

What's your own use case? Do you have a good source of example use cases for ACLs in Windows NT?

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#143

Post by detaro »

justinator wrote: post #141
ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count sendmail in: > There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

As a suggestion, let's keep the homophobia to a nonexistent level, please.

That's a quote by the (gay) developer of sendmail, I don't see how quoting that is homophobic?

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#144

Post by School-Cotton »

pjmlp wrote: post #62
Gravityloss wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I assume you do development? How do you handle scripting, moving files, grepping logs etc?

GUI tooling? Languages like Python?

How would you do this with GUI tooling:

Find all files containing a particular string in a directory tree. For each of those files, if its filename appears in a file called Whitelist, write it to a file called Output. Otherwise, do nothing.

Here is one possible command line version (I haven't tested it as I'm on mobile):

TMPF=`mktemp /tmp/XXXXXXXX` && ag MyString | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq > $TMPF && comm -12 Whitelist $TMPF > Output && rm $TMPF

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#145

Post by bluejekyll »

geezerjay wrote: post #131
bluejekyll wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your reading more into my comment than is there. If you're trying to write a portable app between all of those platforms, would you choose POSIX or would you instead pick a framework or language that has a better high level abstraction?

Again, you're confusing popularity with being technically antiquated or obsolete. The thesis presented in the article is that POSIX is outdated. The popularity of a platform, particularly one which was forced upon the world through a de-facto monopoly, is entirely irrelevant in any argument on the technical merits of a technical standard, particularly when some of those platforms were designed with the express purpos…

Hm. The point of POSIX is to support cross platform development with a single standard. If you find that it is not keeping pace with the most modern and popular platforms, is it not outdated?

Technically speaking I think the standard is great, especially around having consistent definitions for thing like close(). But there are better options on all platforms to the select() and poll() interfaces.

In terms of my desires for open platforms that support open standards, I'm completely with you. If anything what we should be debating is how to update the POSIX standard such that it is worthwhile to target during development.

I don't see how it's helpful to ignore what is popular out in the world.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#146

Post by geezerjay »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #139
geezerjay wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would not if the goal of a standard is uptake by OS and application developers. That point is moot, as those platforms were designed with the express purpose of being particularly hostile regarding interoperability while forcing other corporate products as alternatives, in a well-known lock-in strategy.

"those platforms were designed with the express purpose" They were designed with the purpose of giving users a way to get things done that was profitable to the company. The first part along with lock-in techniques are why most of the desktop market is Windows with a large chunk of the server market. That means the kind of portability that matters to people wanting to maximize benefit to users or profits to the compa…

> They were designed with the purpose of giving users

No, they actually weren't.

The "users" don't have any say whether Windows complies with any standard, or even if Microsoft breaks all of them to try to force the world to submit to their "vendor lock-in" business strategy.

Trying to pass off the consequences of vendor lock-in policies as technical arguments is somewhere between absurd and disingenuous.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#147

Post by geezerjay »

bluejekyll wrote: post #145
geezerjay wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're confusing popularity with being technically antiquated or obsolete. The thesis presented in the article is that POSIX is outdated. The popularity of a platform, particularly one which was forced upon the world through a de-facto monopoly, is entirely irrelevant in any argument on the technical merits of a technical standard, particularly when some of those platforms were designed with the express purpos…

Hm. The point of POSIX is to support cross platform development with a single standard. If you find that it is not keeping pace with the most modern and popular platforms, is it not outdated? Technically speaking I think the standard is great, especially around having consistent definitions for thing like close(). But there are better options on all platforms to the select() and poll() interfaces. In terms of my desi…

> Hm. The point of POSIX is to support cross platform development with a single standard.

No, the point of POSIX is to specify a set of interfaces that software vendors should provide and target if their goal is to provide an UNIX variant or develop UNIX-compliant software.

The key issue is that the main requirement is willingness on behalf of the software vendors to comply with the standard, and offer/target the standardized interface.

If a software company is blatantly hostile regarding interoperability, and bases their business model on vendor lock-in strategies then it's quite obvious that those companies are particularly are not willing to play ball with others regarding interoperability.

Yet, somehow you're presenting those companies, and the consequences of the actions taken by companies that are openly hostile regarding interoperability, as some sort of proof that a specific interoperability target suffers from technical problems.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#148

Post by gens »

notacoward wrote: post #137
JdeBP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole lot of POSIX that they didn't mention. They concentrated upon the system call API and left out all of the concepts (character sets, locale, environment variables, regular expressions, command line conventions), the filesystem, the shell, and the utilities.

They didn't even cover the system call API.

Yep, only libc. And only for some popularly installed (after system install) programs.

>We selected these apps from the official marketplaces for each OS: Google Play (45 apps), Apple AppStore (10 apps), and Ubuntu Software Center (45 apps). We chose popular apps based on the number of installs, selecting apps across nine categories, ..

So mostly GUI programs. Not to mention that probably all those "apps" call into libc eventually (even android ones).

Only thing this made me think about is "why is this taken seriously here?".

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#149

Post by jstimpfle »

skissane wrote: post #37
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> POSIX is full of entities (e.g. notably processes and threads) which can't be manipulated via file descriptors. Well there is /proc

Which isn't a standard part of POSIX. It is an implementation-specific extension, which only some implementations have (OS X most notably lacks it), and even those who have it implement it in incompatible ways (e.g. /proc on Linux is quite different from /proc on Solaris). Also, Linux /proc doesn't really allow you to treat processes as file descriptors like FreeBSD's pdfork does. Sure, I can open /proc/123, but oper…

I think this discussion misses the point what "everything is a file" is about.

The standard way to exchange (read, write) information should be through the Unix file interface where possible. Note that "file" here means "FILE *", i.e. an "opened file" or "stream". Not a file on a filesystem which is just one way to make one kind of stream.

In other words that mantra is about simplicity. Simplicity is what enables software to exist.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#150

Post by hawski »

School-Cotton wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUI tooling? Languages like Python?

How would you do this with GUI tooling: Find all files containing a particular string in a directory tree. For each of those files, if its filename appears in a file called Whitelist, write it to a file called Output. Otherwise, do nothing. Here is one possible command line version (I haven't tested it as I'm on mobile): TMPF=`mktemp /tmp/XXXXXXXX` && ag MyString | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq > $TMPF && comm -…

You probably could use process substitution to get rid of the temp file:

  comm -12 Whitelist  Output
Then you could use unique flag of sort:

  comm -12 Whitelist  Output
Also ag can list only matching files (getting rid of awk and unique):

  comm -12 Whitelist  Output
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