Comment by JuniperMesos
3 months ago
I respect Dennis Ritchie's accomplishments too, but that doesn't mean I want to encode his username as a retired unix username, and in free software projects it's possible for anyone in principle to remove that line of code and rebuild the OS.
I also think that, as important as Unix was for the history of computing, it's also outdated in a lot of ways that I think are holding back computing. We should be reconsidering the use of C to write an operating system at all, as well as the concept of a username in the traditional Unix sense. My ideal operating system wouldn't have `useradd.c` as a concept to begin with.
How would you tell users apart in your ideal operating system?
I think we should reconsider what a user is conceptually. Many, if not most computers, are only used by a single individual (particularly if we count smartphones); but that human user might want to establish a bunch of different contexts or permission modes for various software on their computer depending on what they want to do at any given time. IIRC Android achieves per-app isolation using its Linux kernel by giving every app its own user (in the Linux kernel sense of a user), which is of course pretty different from Dennis Ritchie logging into a PDP-11 with dmr in the 1970s and having that string be associated with his personally-meaningful data artifacts.
With SIDs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad...
ducks
Windows has a lot of great ideas around users, groups and permissions. Primarily built around an enterprise use case instead of a home user or server use case, but overall still a lot more refined than the unix system (in large parts due to being developed decades later)
The Authority/UserName scheme that allows you to use user names from different authorities on the same computer without name collisions, and the hierarchical userids that are SIDs are both quite useful. The most obvious everyday use case are file permissions on shared media like a USB drive or a network drive: knowing these files belong to user 1000 isn't very useful if every computer has a different idea of who that is
They aren't perfect by any means. If you were to design the same thing today you'd probably use UUIDs. But there are a lot of good ideas in there
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