On Sun, 29 Jun 1997, Norm Aleks wrote:
> You're making things complicated by accounting only by file ownership.
> Why not just make a special case for LISTSERV?

This would work, but is the beginning of a very slippery slide if you're
running a very large Unix environment with multiple thousands of users. If
you're really serious about charging for Unix usage, about the only real
mechanism to defeat clever twits is to charge by file ownership. Otherwise
you get random twits storing huge files in unused accounts or other such
nonsense. Sure you can code this in, but what happens with the next
application that runs as root or another user and creates files that you
want to bill to a specific user? You end up maintaining a whole list of
special cases, which makes the accounting code difficult to maintain.

> > That's a valid concern.  So we should leave those small files
> > (LISTNAME.dbXXXX) owned by listserv, but change the ownership on the
> > really big files, i.e. the LISTNAME.logXXXX files, for charging.
> That sounds really ugly.  And those files aren't small :-)

Which is the real argument for an exit point in the file manipulation
code. Eric's made it clear that it's not something high on the list, so we
probably won't see it for a while (if ever). C'est la vie.

-- db