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.