RO /usr idea..
Ian,
I know you're busy at the moment with re-organising the code and
rationalising the BTS, but I thought I'd float this idea past the list.
It would be good, IMO, to make dpkg support a RO /usr partition.
The way I imagine this working is that dpkg (when a specific option is
enabled in its config file, of course), when run with one of the
write-actions (install, purge, remove, etc.) will automatically remount
/usr as read-write, and then remount it read-only afterwards.
This has a few advantages:
1) It means that /usr can be mounted RO for most of the time, protecting
it from damage in the case of system crash.
2) It means that the sysadmin can isolate the time when changes are made
to /usr
3) It allows us to fix 'bugs' in applications which write to /usr, which
is one step towards more successful diskless and shared /usr support.
Any comments?
Jules
/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
| Jelibean aka | jules@jellybean.co.uk | 6 Evelyn Rd |
| Jules aka | jules@debian.org | Richmond, Surrey |
| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
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