The Wanderer <wande...@fastmail.fm> writes: > On 11/22/2014 at 03:44 AM, Philip Hands wrote: > >> Hi Simon, >> >> Thanks for the explanation -- all makes a lot more sense now. >> >> I'm much less tempted to rant about how large chunks of /lib should >> be moved to /etc (which is very good, because I don't suppose I'd be >> the first to suggest it ;-) ) >> >> Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> writes: >> >>> On 21/11/14 17:07, Philip Hands wrote: >>>> Is there any way this isn't going to be an enormous surprise to >>>> people that are used to the way that Debian usually treats /etc? >>> >>> I do get your point; editing the (underlying file for the) .service >>> is unnecessary and undesirable for systemd, and if you blindly do >>> "vi /etc/.../thing.service" and don't realise you're following a >>> symlink, that would be a bad idea. >> >> Given that, it occurs to me that it might be wise to make these files >> in /lib read-only. >> >> If, when attempting to save the .service file, I'd been presented >> with a warning about it being read-only I think it would have been >> enough of a nudge to make me look a bit more closely at what was >> going on with the files (or not) under /etc. > > It wouldn't have been enough for me; I would have just tried again as > root, on the assumption that it was a simple user-permissions issue, and > that would have succeeded since of course root can write data to a-w > files.
Root can, but vim and emacs both tell you that you're writing to a read-only file, and you have to force it -- if you walk past that warnings without pausing for thought, well that's up to you. > That's assuming I hadn't been trying the edit as root to begin with - > which is more likely in any case, since I know quite well that most > files under /etc aren't ordinary-user-writable. > >> Even if it didn't actually save the stumbling user from falling over, >> at least when they start shouting about it the bugs can be closed >> with "Well, we did try to stop you, but you ignored the read-only >> safety catch, and shot your foot anyway". > > That sounds like an unfriendly approach, to say the least. Not if you take into account the fact that someone will have had to do something like :wq! to get past the read-only state of the file. vim put's a [RO] after the filename when you open it, and says this when you try to write it: E45: 'readonly' option is set (add ! to override) in emacs, you get %% in the status line, and it tells you the file's read-only when you start trying to edit it, and refuses to do so until you type C-x C-q to flip it's read-only status. nano sadly doesn't seem to notice :-/ no idea about other editors. I guess that given the fact that nano doesn't protect users, one doesn't get to be rude to them -- oh well ;-) That's probably a bug in nano. I think that for the people that will use an editor that will mention that you're trying to fiddle with a read-only file, it would be helpful, and we could always fix editors that fail to mention that. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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