General Development Archive

Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.

Borland, will announce version 2 of its Kylix package Tuesday. Kylix, introduced in January, lets software developers write programs that can be used on Linux or Windows machines. The new version will add features that improve the product's support for Web services, a representative said. Web services move tasks that took place on a PC or a single server onto a network of servers, ZDNews reports. In other development news, Python 2.2b1 was released.

He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it's not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent's Bell Labs we're talking about ­ the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It's a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it's nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine's Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman." More at Linux Magazine.