Re: [PATCH] Fix bug on Solaris that prevents setuid root files from being created

[Jim Meyering]

David Bartley wrote:
> The following two patches (1 for tar, 1 for gnulib) fix the bug I
> reported earlier [1]. I ran 'make check' successfully on Linux as
> well.

Hi David,

Sorry about the delay.

Thanks for working on this.
Have you started the copyright assignment process
described here (for gnulib it's the same)?
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/plain/HACKING
If not, please do.

While it was a neat hack, the change that added privilege-set
modification to this function did bother me, since it rendered
the function multi-thread-unsafe.

Would you be interested in correcting that?  I suggest providing
two new functions, each with "priv" in its name.  One to remove the
PRIV_SYS_LINKDIR attribute (returning an indication of whether it did
anything), and another to restore it, if needed.

Then the cannot_unlink_dir would simply query it, and callers like
coreutils' "remove" function will be that much closer to being
thread-safe.  Of course, rm.c would have to call your new function to
remove the privilege, up front.