On 11/7/07, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:06:21PM -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>> Next, bind-mount something appropriate onto /tmp and /var/tmp. > > I talked about this with Ivan who requested, at the time, that we > continue using the $SAR directories instead of the FHS ones. > > The basic idea was that we actually _do not_ want activities scribbling > all over the filesystem. Period. Certainly we could use the standard > paths, as you suggest. However, it was an intentional design decision to > break compatibility with the FHS. Using standard directories is not scribbling all over the filesystem! This anti-compatibility attitude needs to stop. It's really hurting OLPC, needlessly making the goals harder to achieve. Breaking compatibility is something to be done as a last resort, when no alterative will work. The long-term goal should be to support solid sandboxing of true all-over-the-filesystem software installs. This may need a unionfs filesystem so that files can be put everywhere without the dummy files needed for file-on-file bind mounts. Imagine if you could install any RPM, knowing that it had no way to corrupt your OS. > > ...where "12345" is the UID, perhaps allocated as the PID of > > the current (root) process plus 10000. > > I wish it were as easy as just setting the pid to something high, but > unforunately, Sugar gets cranky when /etc/passwd and /etc/group don't > contain accurate information about the pid and and primary gid of the > program that's running. Oh. Well, you don't have to work around that bug if you fix it. :-) >> That's one less portability problem. $(SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT)/tmp >> can just go away. > > Do you have some examples of programs which don't listen to $TMPDIR and > which don't take explicit paths to non-volatile storage? If so, would it > not be more appropriate to make these programs even more portable by > removing assumptions they're making about the environment in which > they're running? $TMPDIR doesn't cover /var/tmp, and vi uses /var/tmp, so I guess that would be one. Never minding if it would be a good idea to modify any such programs, needlessly making them fail is a very bad idea. _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
