Magic symlinks redux

[Brooks Davis]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 05:02:31PM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 2008/8/22 Brooks Davis <brooks at freebsd.org>:
> 
> > I have an implementation derived from Andrey's port of the DragonFly
> > implementation which will be committed in the next month or two.  We
> > discussed it in detail at the dev summit and subject to a few more
> > changes and cleanup, it's ready to go.  It allows significantly more
> > flexibility than the NetBSD approach while avoiding many of the pitfalls
> > involved in variant symlinks.
> 
> Does it also support special automatic variables like uid, hostname?

No it does not.  There are two reasons for this.  First, it's basically
pointless since you can set system wide variables for things like
hostname and I have login_conf support to set things like uid or uname
variables.  Second, consider all the implications of @uid in the context
of setuid binaries.  This is hard to reason about and easy to get wrong.
As a result, I feel a model where variables are set per process and
follow fork is much less prone to error.

-- Brooks
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