Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: (C News) limit filesize and inews
Message-ID: <1991Jan3.214226.9184@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <27839439.1746@ics.uci.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 91 21:42:26 GMT

In article <27839439.1746@ics.uci.edu> nagel@ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) writes:
>...Given that this guess is correct, should relaynews ensure
>that it's resource limitations are appropriate...

This would be a good idea, were it possible.  The problem is that such
limitations are extremely unportable and code that manipulates them is
even more so.  In addition, often you need superuser privileges to
raise or remove a limit.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but contorting *every* program
a user might invoke that might have to modify a big database is not it.
Especially when such programs may be shell files that have considerable
trouble coping with such stupid impositions.  It would make a whole lot
more sense if the kernel disabled such limits for setuid programs.  The
list of things that setuid programs have to worry about is already
excessively long; we don't need gratuitous additions to it courtesy of
stupid implementors.

(If you think news history is a bad case, consider the result of hitting
such a limit while updating /etc/passwd and friends.)
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry