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* The eternal uid issue
@ 2014-07-23  8:01 D. Boland
  2014-07-23  8:19 ` Linda Walsh
  2014-07-23  9:14 ` The eternal uid issue Corinna Vinschen
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 28+ messages in thread
From: D. Boland @ 2014-07-23  8:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: cygwin

Hi Cygwin lovers,

After some weeks of serious compiling, researching, understanding, fixing, testing
and compiling again, I managed to get the Sendmail source code compiled and working.

But I had to compromise in some critical areas. One of them is the uid issue.

* sendmail, procmail, mail.local assume that the id of the privileged user is '0'.

Within the current Cygwin DLL, this is '18'. So the maintainer of, let's say, the
procmail code has to change a constant, named ROOT_uid to be 18 if compiled in
cygwin. I had to do the same in Sendmails' own Mail Delivery Agent, 'mail.local'.

But that's no real fix. That's a work-around. Cygwin is supposed to emulate Linux,
so why not change the 'getuid' function to return '0' if the uid is '18'? This is
exactly what all Linux source code expects, so we would never have to worry about it
again.

Instead, maintainers constantly have to "correct" this "bug" in every new version of
their source code.

The general idea behind this is "never to break user space", where the programs are
seen as the users. Actually, it's Linus Torwalds's first rule of kernel programming
and one can read here how serious he is about this:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Isn't it about time to make this our First Directive also?

Daniel


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 28+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2014-07-31 12:48 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 28+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2014-07-23  8:01 The eternal uid issue D. Boland
2014-07-23  8:19 ` Linda Walsh
2014-07-23  8:34   ` D. Boland
2014-07-26  2:07     ` The deprecated uid issue: use caps Linda Walsh
2014-07-26 13:29       ` D. Boland
2014-07-23  9:14 ` The eternal uid issue Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-23 11:31   ` D. Boland
2014-07-23 15:13     ` Larry Hall (Cygwin)
2014-07-23 15:24     ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-24  6:48       ` D. Boland
2014-07-24 13:52         ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-24 21:38           ` D. Boland
2014-07-24 22:18             ` Jeffrey Altman
2014-07-25 12:42             ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-25 12:47               ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-25 14:01                 ` D. Boland
2014-07-28  8:03               ` D. Boland
2014-07-28  9:14                 ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-28 11:38                   ` D. Boland
2014-07-28 11:53                     ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-28 12:04                       ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-29 14:02                       ` D. Boland
2014-07-30 13:10                         ` Corinna Vinschen
2014-07-31 12:48                           ` D. Boland
2014-07-23 16:20     ` Andrey Repin
2014-07-23 16:27       ` Christopher Faylor
2014-07-24  9:30         ` D. Boland
2014-07-24 13:20           ` Andrey Repin

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