* Steve Lamb said: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > On Fri, 16 Apr 1999 21:05:07 +0200, Marek Habersack wrote: > > >Hmm... isn't it easier to simply make root use some kind of static shell by > >default? One shouldn't ever login as root to do everyday's life tasks, so > >the shell should guarantee that it'll run all the bourne scripts and, as a > >consequence, all the shell scripts should be rewritten to get rid of > >anything specific to any variation of shell. > > Operative word in the entire paragraph is "shouldn't." At home I su to > root all the time to do work on it. 99.9999% of the time, I don't need > statically linked things happening yet any time I go into root it would take > up the memory. It is only during the exception that I need statically linked > things. Hmm... that "only" is what worries me the most. Aren't exceptions what makes our life harder? SHOULD an exception happen you can lose ALL your data, ALL your work - EVERYTHING. The argument that something happens rarely isn't really convincing for me. If it happens, and it CAN happen, one can lose too much. What you do at home is your decision and your risk :)) but there are many "production" systems running huge sites that simply must take into account every possibility of crash and have ways to deal with it. > > Bearing that in mind, the sane thing to do is to make the default work > well with what will happen most of the time, IE, dynamic loading, etc. Then > provide an alternative that will work in the alternate part of the time. Just a separate package with static versions of the necessary stuff would do - for those paranoid ones out there :)))))) (like myself) :) > >All the binaries that might be necessary in such a situation should always > >be linked statically - AFAIR, the old Slackware dists had a set of the > >standard binaries linked statically and renamed to binaryname.static. That > >would certainly be a way to go - after all, those binaries wouldn't take up > >too much disk space... > > AFAIAC, that is ALL binaries. That is, most certainly, not an option. Naah... Why would you need netscape, mc, mutt, pine, eggdrop, emacs and a loads of other stuff? What you have in /bin is enough to do maintenance work > And before you say "those binaries wouldn't take up too much disk space..." > realize that not everyone has disk space to spare. I'm quite lucky to have > 2Gb on my main machine and 520mb on my laptop as it is. I don't want more of > those drives being taken up, even for rescue operations. Hmm... Well, small home systems surely don't need all that superfluous stuff, but there are many more servers out there that DO need it. And those have plenty of diskspace. What's 5MB after all?? > I've chosen to install sash, which does the job. I've not had to use it > and hopefully I never will. But it is there *if* I need it. The rest of the > time I su into root to work on root things and it isn't take space away from Well, I almost never su to root... I'd estimate running as root constitutes 1% of my time spent at the console... > the work that my admitedly overloaded[*] machine is doing. > > [*] 64Mb, I run telnet, smtp, web, ftp, mailing lists, X and, on occasion, > VMWare on the machine all at the same time. I need every K I can get. :) Well, so do I :)))) (save for VMWare) :)))))) marek
Attachment:
pgpE_50gd65lG.pgp
Description: PGP signature