Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) 299thought, “Fine, I’ll recompile it.” This didn’t work either because it
was depending on intermediate files that had been recompiled for the
other architecture.So... What losing Unix features caused me grief here.
Rather than having a rational scheme of priv bits on users, there is
a single priv’d user who can do anything.
Unix was designed in a networkless world, and most systems that
run on it assume at some level or other that you are only using one
host.
NFS assumes that the client has done user validation in all cases
except for root access, where it assumes that the user is evil and can’t
be trusted no matter what.
Unix has this strange idea of building your system in one place,
and then moving the things you need to another. Normally this just
means that you can never find the source to a given binary, but it gets
even hairier in a heterogeneous environment because you can keep
the intermediate files for only one version at a time.
I got mail last night from the author of this system telling me to relax
because this is supposed to be fun. I wonder if Usenix attendees sit in
their hotel rooms and stab themselves in the leg with X-Acto knives
for fun. Maybe at Usenix, they all get together in the hotel’s grand
ballroom and stab themselves in the leg as a group.