On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Richard Purdie <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 12:32 +0000, Laszlo Papp wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Is there any obstacle why this cannot be /root as per default Unix >> philosophy [1]? >> >> It is not an unusual that the /home partition is a separate, and the >> sysadmins would like to manage the core system without getting that >> partition mounted, etc. >> >> It is true that it would be possible to work that around, but /root as >> a default just feels so much more natural on a Unix system. >> >> What I currently see after talking to a few people, the people keep >> changing it in their layer (distribution) config. It looks sub-optimal >> at first, but perhaps there are still valid reasons to keep this >> around? >> >> I was told on IRC the first embedded debian may have done it to keep >> rootfs read-only. First, you can remount the root partition on jffs2, >> ubifs, etc... as R/W. >> >> Even if you could not, you can have a separate /root partition which >> is a good idea anyway to keep the super-user separate from the >> "regular" users. If that is not OK, there is still the option for the >> minority to override it to /home/root if really needed, but I >> personally do not think it should be... >> >> So, all in all, I am in favor of changing this back to /root to be >> more linux-y and well-separated from the normal users. >> >> Unfortunately, it would lead to some breakages out there when they >> update Yocto, so it may not be acceptable in this project. I do not >> know the rules. The migration could be aided though with some proper >> documentation. > > These directories can be configured by the user extremely easily.
To be fair, it would be just as extremely easy to configure it to "/home/root" as the other way around. > By having a default of /home/root/ we can catch software that has issues > with relocation of that. I am not sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate? > Having the writeable user data in one directory like this is useful for > several classes of embedded style devices. Could you please provide any examples? I have not seen any use cases myself out there, but after a quick poke around, other people seem to have similar experiences around me. As written in my initial email, I do not target "several" use cases. I am referring to the majority which, as per Unix philosophy, I am somewhat opinionated that is "/root". > So to be honest I don't see a pressing reason to change this. I do, because the earlier it is done, the fewer users that may have incompatible changes. As the time goes ahead, more and more users will stick to it as "default". I believe this means those who do not care about proper Unix separation. _______________________________________________ Openembedded-core mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core
