Re: IMMUTABLE and APPEND-ONLY rationales

[Andi Kleen]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2000 at 01:41:29PM -0700, Linda Walsh wrote:
> > From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]]
> > Even root cannot delete immutable and append-only files again. So if every
> > user was allowed to do that he/she could create a lot of problems for root
> > (like creating undeletable files in /tmp) 
> ---
> 
> Root is already privileged to set/unset those bits on any file regardless
> of ownership.  It does not follow that this would change if users could
> set those bits on their own files.  

In the original implementation (pre 2.0) that wasn't the case when secure
level was > 0. securelevel was dropped later because it was broken. 
The root restriction is a leftover.

-Andi