This blog post shows an interesting difference between the Perl community and the Ruby community. The Ruby community lives to write long blog posts about why you are writing code wrong. The Perl community just makes a library everyone can use to avoid getting things wrong in the first place.
Interesting point, but I think of it as teaching a man how to fish and giving him fish. If you read and understand this blog post,
1. You can write your own lib
2. You can spot bugs in other programs regarding privileges
3. You have an understanding of how privileges work and can transfer that knowledge to other programming languages/problems.
4. When you use a third party lib for, say dropping privileges, you can actually verify that they are doing it right because you actually understand what is going on and what is needed.
Consider the case where the blog post is not entirely correct. How do you tell everyone that cut-n-pasted the code from the blog to fix their apps?
You can't. At least with libraries, someone can report a bug or send a patch, and you can release a fixed version. Any reasonably competent developer will eventually notice the new version and upgrade the module. Problem fixed.
With a blog post, there is no reasonable way to push out new features, patches, bug fixes, security fixes, etc.
You are thinking in terms of code. I'm thinking in terms of knowledge.
What you should take away from the blog post is not the code. It is the knowledge. It has given a good starting point, on doing your own research. Just using a lib usually never leads to that.
5. When the Ruby library for doing this is written and published, and you're trying to convince people to use it instead of rolling their own, you can refer them to this blog post.
This post is promoting the Proc::UID library, which was apparently only a year old at the time and was not quite finished. The release on CPAN was marked "for testing and review purposes only. Please do not use in production code."
Yes, the author of Proc::UID discussed his module in public. That's not what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about the Ruby community's general love for cut-n-paste instead of actual library writing.
Anyway, compare planet perl and planet ruby some time. The Ruby posts are overwhelmingly "cut-n-paste this code" and the Perl posts are generally "here is a module I wrote". Different cultures.
Anecdotally, most Ruby blog posts I've seen describing how people are "doing it wrong" are just introductions to a gem or plugin on someone's Github account.
Seems to me that you're just taking a cheap shot at Rubyists. :)
- Usenet posts about how to write code correctly
(predated blogs)
- Smalltalk images that contained badly factored code
written by junior people, in all the places where
other junior people would look and imitate
- Years after the heyday of Smalltalk, there's now an
automated tool that will find bugs and critique code
for you, but at this point there are very few who
care.
(http://search.cpan.org/~tlbdk/Privileges-Drop-1.00/lib/Privi...)