On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 04:10:39PM +0100, Benny Amorsen wrote:
> Mounting the fs read only is much easier and safer - and has long tradition.
This is not feasible as a distribution policy. You can't guarantee that
/usr/bin is on its own partition so you can mount it read only.
of course it is not guaranteed. But it is not difficult to detect and I think
plenty of sysadmins are doing it that way. Used to have many more advantages
than just a marginal gain in security.
Fedora certainly can not mandate this as a policy it would be nice if it would
work with this common setup.
Also, the advantage of the proposed change was that it would not
affect
e.g. yum upgrade. Creative use of mount --bind could perhaps achieve the
same result, but not in a way which I consider sane.
that would be indeed insane. But as has been mentioned rpm could have a hook
to do some actions before and after modifying anything.
All in all I think it's a shame that the original proposal
didn't work
out at this time. Having binaries owned by bin:bin does have Unix (but
not Linux AFAIK) tradition behind it.
now that you mention bin:bin, I remember the old days.
Richard