On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:14 AM, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us> wrote:
On 01/02/2014 03:42 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>
> That would imply that someone actually took the decision to *remove* the
> protections against leaving the system with no installed kernel. Was
> this discussed? What were the proposers smoking?
>
It's always been a principle that *nix won't stop you from doing something
stupid if it prevents me from doing something clever. I can't see how
removing the installed kernel could be clever, but that might have been
behind their thinking.
Note that I didn't say "prevent", I said "protect". Yum
doesn't prevent it
either, since you can easily get round the protection it provides if you
want to, but it stops silly accidents from happening and that's a Good
Thing (tm). Just like 'rm' will ask you to confirm when you try to remove a
protected file, unless you use the '-f' option.
Actually, AIUI, the file isn't removed until the last program
that's using
it closes the file.
Of course, this is standard Unix semantics. The only time it will bite you
is when the system wants to open a file that has been removed. I wouldn't
want to rely on it not wanting to do that.
poc