From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Apr  9 16:44: 3 2002
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Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 16:42:52 -0700
From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
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To: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc: Crist J.Clark <cjc@FreeBSD.ORG>,
	Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>,
	Michael Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>,
	Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>,
	=?iso-8859-1?Q?Pawe=B3?= Jakub Dawidek <nick@garage.freebsd.pl>,
	freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Hardlinks...
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0204091210120.57350-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
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Julian Elischer wrote:
> As terry knows of course, the Interjet
> had the following /etc/symlinks: (excuse linewrap)
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   wheel         20 Mr 28  2001 crontab@ ->
> /writable/system/crontab
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   wheel         18 Mr 28  2001 group@ ->
> /writable/system/group

[ ... ]

> the single root+usr partition is mounted read-only.

Yes, but appealing to a product I had something to do with,
even if that organization wasn't mine in particular, makes
a much less powerful argument.

The other thing that's a bit painful about that argument
is that the symlinks failed to operate as expected for
the master.passwd, if the / was mounted read/write.  I
count this as a bug in the password database generation
code, but it should be noted that it can be a problem (e.g
the symlink is renamed to the backup, and the replacement
file is created in /etc; it does the right thing, if the
symlink is read-only, though...).

8-(.

-- Terry

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