Re: [ECOS] chmod (crops up on YAFFS)

[Andrew Lunn <andrew at lunn dot ch>]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 04:56:56PM +0100, Rutger Hofman wrote:
> Good afternoon list,
>
> I am making good progress with YAFFS on top of the eCos NAND Flash  
> library; I can mkdir/rmdir, opendir/readdir, rename, open/creat/unlink,  
> read/write files, and walk the directory tree on my NAND flash chip.
>
> Now, one thing I am unhappy about is file/directory permissions. YAFFS  
> has permissions (user/group/other a la POSIX), but eCos has no chmod()  
> call. In old exchanges on this list I saw this crop up on FAT, but FAT's  
> attributes are different from (POSIX) file permissions. Some guru back  
> then advised an implementation of chmod() that calls cyg_fs_setinfo()  
> with a FS_INFO_CHMOD tag. But this route was not taken: I see no chmod()  
> anywhere.
>
> Would it be a good idea that I add chmod() to file.cxx/fileio.h that  
> does take the above route, and implement it by having it call  
> cyg_fs_setinfo() with a tag FS_INFO_CHMOD? My guess is that this  
> shouldn't break the other filesystems, they would return an error code  
> on an unknown tag FS_INFO_CHMOD.

The problem with permissions is that they require a concept of a user
identity. eCos does not have this. There is no uid to know if the user
owns the file. There is no group of users to know if the group
permissions are valid. So how do you decide which of the ugo bits to
look at?

Without a concept of ugo, how is YAFFS even using the ugo permission?
I feel that in eCos chmod() is pointless...

        Andrew

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