Re: [PATCH - ping] Don't unlink /dev/null on darwin

[Paul Brook <paul at codesourcery dot com>]

On Monday 14 February 2005 17:59, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> The second patch is a possible general stopgap to prevent this sort of
> scenario from causing damage in the future.  It is a very big hammer,
> and I recognize that it may break stuff, but I am nonetheless deadly
> serious about proposing it.  It is not ready for inclusion as is - it
> may well be in the wrong place (Peter, if you feel like it, I'd
> appreciate your experimenting to see whether or not it prevents the
> Darwin assembler from unlinking /dev/null if you run the problem
> command by hand as root) and it certainly needs autoconf goo.  Right
> now, though, what I want to hear about is not these minor details, but
> rather compelling reasons why we should *not* do this, because I can't
> think of any.

Because it will break every [arguably buggy] install/make script which ends up 
running the compiler. I know running gcc as root is bad practice, but I can 
think of semi-legitimate reasons for doing so, especially on sandbox systems.
Even more so for the preprocessor.

I guess I'd be a bit happier with a -frun-as-root option to override the 
check.

Paul