On 05/01/16 08:10, Svante Signell wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-01-04 at 20:43 +0000, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> karl@??? writes:
>>> chaosesqueteam@???:
>>>> I don't understand the desire to change it at all.
>
> See UsrMerge discussion on debian-devel. They wan to move most stuff in / to
> /usr and make it readonly. (The only sensible motivation I've found so far is
> for NFS, but how many people use that?

It would seem to be a potentially useful tool in managing a fleet of locked-down
desktops with the end users prevented from modifying their system.

It would also be helpful if a vendor wanted to sell locked-down desktops without
root access, the way Samsung does very profitably with their android systems ...
using selinux to limit what the user can do ('owner' doesn't seem an accurate
word for the person who acquires such a device, while that system remains in place).

Or perhaps set up a flock of virtual servers with shared read-only systems.

All of which are the kind of use-cases the people pushing the changes in debian
hope to make $$$ from, and they are real and valid use-cases. But they are all
the exact opposite of the original motivation for debian, GNU and everything
most people here believe in. Instead those use-cases should be developed and
maintained within the corporate budgets that hope to profit from them, within
their own distributions ... Red Hat, Canonical etc.

It is very grim that Debian has allowed itself to be co-opted as a cheap
resource for those companies, but really I do not believe that will be the
outcome ... more likely it will just be knackered in a way which leaves less
choice for the less sophisticated end user and persuades more open source
developers to focus on making their work fully compliant with those corporate
oriented distributions. Fantasies of becoming the android of the desktop, with
app stores and advertising revenue flowing in their direction. Not likely, the
direct consumer market is already taken, by Samsung, Apple, Google, Facebook etc
... and they have much much bigger resources to deploy in keeping it.


Simon