[systemd-devel] CoreOS Goal Question: Should we be aiming to be able to boot with an empty /etc?

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Lennart Poettering at 07/01/13 13:37 did gyre and gimble:
> On Mon, 07.01.13 11:48, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just thinking outload here as dealing with some packages where stuff in
>> /etc was marked in the spec as %config and it really shouldn't be (I'm
>> thinking dbus policy files and rootcerts mainly but there are do doubt
>> countless other examples where this is true also).
>>
>> I was thinking, is it a general stated aim that we should be able to
>> boot with an empty /etc? I know this isn't true today, but with
>> appropriate effort is that where we should be aiming?
>>
>> I guess the same should be true of /var too probably (i.e. packages
>> should be able to cope with initing themselves on first use and not rely
>> on doing it at package install).
> 
> The stuff we design in systemd should work fine with an empty /etc. And
> I think it would be a nice goal to achieve this for the whole
> platform. That said, it's kinda unrealistic to achieve that anytime
> soon.
> 
> On Android you can drop the configuration partition to do a "firmware
> reset" and we should really try to implement something similar with our
> /etc.
> 
> There's a currently a lot of stuff in /etc though that really doesn't
> belong there. For example databases such as /etc/services or
> /etc/protocols really should live in /usr/share or so. It's fine
> allowing people to override these databases in /etc, but the upstream
> databse should not be considered primary configuration that should live
> in /etc.

Cool, that's all basically matching my general feelings also.

So now that most of the distros are nicely working on CoreOS stuff a bit
more closely these days (with special kudos to the Arch folk I think!)
we can probably all keep this in mind as we march forward. Getting the
dbus stuff out of there would be a nice start me thinks :)

Cheers!

Col

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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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