[Fedora-livecd-list] skel, root, bindmount inversion, relayfs, and lions and tigers and bears, oh MY!

[Jane Dogalt]

--- "J. Hartline" <jasperhartline at adelphia.net> wrote:
 
> >
> This seems to be overly glorified to me, /etc/skel will always exist as 
> it belongs to the filesystem package, unless you are using

Isn't the real issue here that kadischi is nuking the contents of /root?

Rather than nuke and then copy /etc/skel, I think the answer is to leave /root
alone.

Of course the decision was originally made probably due to /root living in
tmpfs, and not wanting things like install.syslog or whatever around.

My suggestion (toshio or someone else will probably beat me to the actual
posting of code :) is to overhaul the way kadischi uses filesystems, i.e.
tmpfs, and readonly zisofs/squashfs.

Currently root is read-only, and then writable tmpfs directories are bind
mounted there.  I suggest, and have successfully used in the past, the inverse
method, which is to make / a tmpfs, and then bindmount big readonly directories
there.

Of course that was a long time ago before the advent (or at least
out-of-the-box availability) of unionfs/relayfs.  These days we should be able
to have a completely generic fully populated read-only / (coming from the full
system install), with a full read-write tmpfs / overlayed/unioned/relayfsd on
top.

With such a configuration, we can even unwind the special read-only root
considerations, and be able to do _anything_.  I.e. do a "yum install emacs"
right after boot.

Don't get me started with how cool it would be to put a massively prepopulated
network filesystem in that unionfs/relayfs stack as well :).

Or user usbstick filesytems, or user configuration filesystems pulled from the
network, or... or...

-jdog
 

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