On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 12:14 AM, Joe Zeff <joe@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