Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs

maybe i'm a moron, but i find that trying to map the non-hierarchical
layout of the apache httpd.conf to a mental overlay for the server's
(virtual) filesystem/URI space to be way beyond my competence. .htac-
cess files at least have the virtue of controls being in proximity to
the stuff they control, though that thinking runs entirely counter to
the point being made in the article, the extended-attribute bloat,
etc. so maybe i just drank the inode/xattr Kool-Aid to my permanent
detriment, but the ``composability'' of the permissions by masking
them through the filesystem's links down to the object of concern is
something i just totally grok. (i think there must be some connec-
tion i should make here about exploiting the grafted-on filesystem
trees design to the full being part-and-parcel, but i am obviously not
a big-picture type, and i think that case was made for chroot/name-
space forking)

i'll concede that maybe AFS directory-only permissions might simplify
things a bit, at the fringes