Re: deprecating /usr as a standalone filesystem?

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

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

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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