Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) 299 thought, “Fine, I’ll recompile it.” This didn’t work either because it was depending on intermediate files that had been recompiled for the other architecture. So… What losing Unix features caused me grief here. 1) Rather than having a rational scheme of priv bits on users, there is a single priv’d user who can do anything. 2) Unix was designed in a networkless world, and most systems that run on it assume at some level or other that you are only using one host. 3) NFS assumes that the client has done user validation in all cases except for root access, where it assumes that the user is evil and can’t be trusted no matter what. 4) Unix has this strange idea of building your system in one place, and then moving the things you need to another. Normally this just means that you can never find the source to a given binary, but it gets even hairier in a heterogeneous environment because you can keep the intermediate files for only one version at a time. I got mail last night from the author of this system telling me to relax because this is supposed to be fun. I wonder if Usenix attendees sit in their hotel rooms and stab themselves in the leg with X-Acto knives for fun. Maybe at Usenix, they all get together in the hotel’s grand ballroom and stab themselves in the leg as a group.

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