Re: [SECURITY] Re: PATCH: rm -rf and readdir bug in coreutils-6.7

[Paul Eggert]

Mikulas Patocka <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 29 Dec 2006, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
>> Obviously stable file
>> serial numbers are implementable.  They just aren't easily
>> implementable if one chooses the wrong implementation strategy.
>
> How would you implement them for FAT filesystem?

I wouldn't.  FAT is not a good implementation strategy for
POSIX-compatible file systems.

>> For light duty applications like "cp foo bar", "cp" should work
>> just fine.
>
> It won't if they randomly happen to have the same inode.

Sure, but that's unlikely.  So it's good enough for light duty
applications, where correctness isn't that big an issue.

> What really scares me is that this posix-requirements are getting
> tighter and tighter

This comes about largely because the correctness and performance
constraints on coreutils are getting tighter and tighter.  This is a
good thing for users, but it does mean that coreutils implementers
must work harder, and can't settle for the low-quality approaches that
were good enough back in the days of OS/2.