This has probably been replied to, but..

Sticky text never resided in core proper; it always got stashed away
in swap space.  "Sticky" meant that it never got unloaded from the
VM system, NOT that it never got swapped out or never left core.
Its use was for programs which were commonly used; the pointers
to the blocks of the program were kept in core so that it didn't
have to be constantly reloaded, but the blocks themselves would get
stashed in swap even when there were no active references to the program.
This was, I think, the first step towards shared text...

Shared text has been around for at least a decade now, and sticky
text is pretty nigh useless.  I think it exists for compatibility
reasons.  We should probably think about a better use for that mode bit.

Speaking of mode bits, it might not be a bad idea to use the suid bit
on a directory to keep other people from creating directories in certain
places (I certainly don't see it being used for any _other_ purposes).

I could rant on how the sticky bit on directories should have been the
setuid bit, with the sticky bit being used for the aforementioned function,
but I wasn't sufficiently closely connected to the authors at the time
to make such a suggestion.


				--*greywolf;
--
BSD -> Solaris:		It could be worse.
UNIX -> NT:		It's worse.