acl_get_file() -- failure mode when ACLs not available on file system?

[Robert Watson]

Just to throw some more fuel on the fire: returning EOPNOTSUPP would be
nice for situations where a file system doesn't offer protection (ISO 9660
cd file system, for example) and you'd like to report that fact to the
application without attempting to non-sensically emulate ownership and
permissions for the object.  The ability to return EOPNOTSUPP legally
would mean that file systems (such as AFS, SMBfs, NFSv4, ...) would not
have to emulate permission/POSIX.1e ACL semantics with very poor side
effects.  In any of these cases, either the burden of handling failure is
placed on the application, or the file system masks the failure.  I'd
rather see explicit failure than poorly masked failure..

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
robert at fledge.watson.org      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services

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