On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 3:42 AM, Al Viro [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 04:58:29PM -0400, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

[ So I answered similarly to another patch, but I'll just re-iterate
and change the subject line so that it stands out a bit from the
millions of actual patches ]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Pavel Machek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Everyone knows what 0644 is, but noone can read S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR |
S_IRCRP | S_IROTH (*). Please don't do this.

Absolutely. It's *much* easier to parse and understand the octal
numbers, while the symbolic macro names are just random line noise and
hard as hell to understand. You really have to think about it.

So we should rather go the other way: convert existing bad symbolic
permission bit macro use to just use the octal numbers.

The symbolic names are good for the *other* bits (ie sticky bit, and
the inode mode _type_ numbers etc), but for the permission bits, the
symbolic names are just insane crap. Nobody sane should ever use them.
Not in the kernel, not in user space.

Except that you are inviting the mixes like S_IFDIR | 17 /* oops, should've
been 017, or do we spell it 0017? */ that way.  I certainly agree that this
patch series had been a huge pile of manure, but "let's convert it in other
direction" is inviting pretty much the same thing, with lovely potential for
typos, etc.

We could add several macro with readable names for really used rwx
combinations, like:

#define KERN_SECRET_RO 0400
#define KERN_SECRET_RW 0600
#define KERN_SECRET_WO 0200
#define KERN_SECRET_DIR 0500

#define KERN_PUBLIC_RO 0444
#define KERN_PUBLIC_RW 0644
#define KERN_PUBLIC_DIR 0555

#define KERN_UNSAFE_RW 0666
#define KERN_UNSAFE_WO 0222
#define KERN_UNSAFE_DIR 0777

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