[HADOOP-2552] enable hdfs permission checking by default

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.16.0
• Assignee: Doug Cutting
• Reporter: Doug Cutting
• Created: 08/Jan/08 20:46
• Updated: 08/Jul/09 16:42
• Resolved: 09/Jan/08 22:51

Description

We should enable permission checking in dfs by default. Currently, on upgrade, all file permissions are 777, so this is a back-compatible change. After an upgrade folks can change owners and groups and limit permissions, and things will work as expected.

The current default, dfs.permissions=false, gives inconsistent behaviour: permissions are displayed in 'ls' and returned by the FileSystem APIs, but they're not enforced. In future releases we will certainly want dfs.permissions=true to be the default, and making it so now will thus also avoid an incompatible change.

dfs.permissions=false should be an optional, non-default configuration that some sites may decide to use. It is further defined in HADOOP-2543.