On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 12:38:45PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> it is the principle of the thing. /root is the home directory
> for the root user. Home directories are mutable, programs may store
> configuration files there, as may the user, by themselves. The root
> user should not be more constrained than other users on the machine are;
> making wirking as root irritating, less customizable, and harder does
> not help the end user admin any.
>
> Ideally, we should map /root somewhere persistent, writable, and
> also a location available in single user mode; and there are few
> pleasing solutions that meet that criteria; though less than perfect
> solutions exist.
I fail to see how root is different to any other random user in this
regard. If you want / to be read-only, then you should ensure that /home
points to something writable. The same thing holds for /root. You can
make /home and /root to be separate filesystems, or bind mounts or
symlinks pointing to a writable location. If you can handle /home today
then you can also handle /root exactly the same way.
So the only thing to do is ensure that whatever code/documentation talks
about /home should also talk about/handle /root as well. In fact, if /
is supposed to be read-only, then I see absolutely no reason to use
/root instead of /home/root. Maybe we need an option in the installer to
set root's HOME directory to /home/root instead of /root?
Gabor
--
---------------------------------------------------------
MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
---------------------------------------------------------
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
