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To: proff@suburbia.net
cc: nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams), msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au,
        terry@lambert.org, sef@kithrup.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: on the subject of changes to -RELEASEs... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 10 Apr 1997 15:46:58 +1000."
             <19970410054658.5894.qmail@suburbia.net> 
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 00:07:03 -0700
Message-ID: <20842.860656023@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> The design principals behind /etc are heading in the right direction
> but seem to lack vision.  Jordon, call me an engineering psychopath,

It's "Jordan" and ok, you're an engineering psychopath. ;-)

> but it is my belief that FreeBSD should attempt to adopt a file-system
> organisation whereby after the system is installed, write access
> can be removed completely from the root and /usr because any
> configuration changes do not require modification of any of these
> partitions. Upgrades, re-installation and protection against trojans
> then become trivial.

The problem is that the minute you start removing things from /etc and
putting them in their more "logical" places, the learning curve for
existing UNIX admins goes up and this too is "cost."

However, if you were to say that everything in /etc should depend on a
single writable configuration file, I wouldn't argue with the
principle (and it's what I had in mind for /etc/sysconfig) but simply
point to the fact that "everyone" knows about files like
/etc/resolv.conf too, and if you put "domain=blah.com" and
"resolver1=foo .. resolvern=bar" lines into /etc/sysconfig and
made resolv.conf redundant (or removed it) there would be a lot of
confusion.

					Jordan