Getting rid of /usr for F12?

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Fri Apr 17 23:11:13 UTC 2009


On Sat, 18.04.09 01:02, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kofler at chello.at) wrote:

> 
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > On Debian /etc doesn't need to be rw. And it wouldn't be too difficult
> > to allow the same on Fedora.
> 
> Mounting /etc read-only makes no sense at all, config files are designed to
> be writable.

Oh, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, most config files are only
touched during installation and during package upgrades. Otherwise
they are practically read-only. During package upgrades or if the
admin really wants to change something he can temporarily remount / to
rw without a problem. This is eprfectly well supported by Debian.

Now, the only stumbling block for this is that some files (like
/etc/resolv.conf) are rewritten from time to time. But that's a bad
bad misdesign anyway and we should really get rid of
/etc/resolv.conf. In the meantime one can do what Debian did and make
resolv.conf a symlink to a writable location.

> Relatedly, files which are not intended to be reconfigured by the system
> administrator belong into /usr/share, not /etc. Unfortunately, quite some
> software gets this wrong (basically, any file in /etc not marked %config is
> a sign that something is abusing /etc).

You are going to have fun with that. Succeeding with moving stuff like
/etc/services to /usr/share is even more unlikely than pushing the
removal of /usr through in Fedora.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4




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