On Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 01:57:31AM +0000, Al Viro wrote: > On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 02:58:57PM -1000, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 2:54 PM Linus Torvalds > > <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > And nobody really complained when we weakened it, so maybe removing it > > > entirely might be acceptable. > > > > I guess we could just try it and see... Worst comes to worst, we'll > > have to put it back, but at least we'd know what crazy thing still > > wants it.. > > Umm... I'll need to go back and look through the thread, but I'm > fairly sure that there used to be suckers that did replacement of > binary that way (try to write, count on exclusion with execve while > it's being written to) instead of using rename. Install scripts > of weird crap and stuff like that... ... and before anyone goes off - I certainly agree that using that behaviour is not a good idea and had never been one. All I'm saying is that there at least used to be very random (and rarely exercised) bits of userland relying upon that behaviour.
