On Thu, May 14 2009, Gabor Gombas wrote:
> 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?
Sure. I can hack things so that I have a writable home directory
for root while having a read only /. But then it is incorrect to state
that it "works out of the box".
manoj
--
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference
between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain
Manoj Srivastava <sriva...@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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