[ale] Allow non-root user to chown file to other user?

[Jeff Lightner]

That's the basic question.  If a non-root user owns a file and wants to
give ownership to another user it says "operation not permitted".

I've been looking at a lot of stuff, capabilities, chattr, mount
options, etc... and see many people ask this question but no real
resolution.

There are no ACLs in use.   
There are no attributes set on the files shown by lsattr.  
Yes it works as root.
The filesystem is ext3 using "defaults" for options.
This is an issue on Fedora 4 and RHEL 5 (and every Linux from RH 7.3
based on my Google research).

Solaris has a way to set this globally.   HP-UX has a slightly different
way to allow or deny chown authority.   I'm looking for something
similar in Linux.

Please do NOT tell me it is a bad idea to allow users to do this 
I'm asking if it is possible and how to do it - NOT whether it is a good
idea.  (If you know how and want to add a caution about specific issue
you've seen doing it after telling me how that's fine.)

Please do NOT tell me to give the user access to sudo chown.blah blah
blah
Obviously this can be done (and would have to be carefully done to
prevent exploits).   I'm asking whether I can simply give a user the
ability to do it directly using the chown command alone.

Please do NOT tell me to use Ubuntu or some other distro.
I'm asking how to do it on the distros I'm currently using.  (Also my
Googling seems to suggest this may not be restricted to
Fedora/RedHat/CentOS anyway.)

Please DO tell me if it is not possible if you have a technical
explanation as to why (that is please don't just say "Redhat doesn't
allow it").


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