Re: goal: booting with an empty /etc

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On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 9:58 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
<zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> There is a long-term goal of moving packaged files out of /etc, so that
> only actual local configuration remains in /etc. This has some advantages:
>
> - Local configuration, i.e. the result of local administrative actions,
>   is nicely split from static configuration that is part of package payload.
>   'find /etc' will show what is special to this local system, while
>   'find /usr' lists stuff that is part of packages and the same between
>   systems.
> - We can support "factory reset" at the system level, i.e. do 'rm -rf /etc'
>   to return everything to distro defaults. We're not there _yet_, but it
>   works with a surprisingly large subset of packages.
> - We can support "factory reset" at a package level, by removing all the
>   configuration and state of an individual package, without reinstalling it
>   (possibly combined with some tmpfiles.d config to recreate things
>   automatically.)
> - It becomes easier to build systems which are delivered as a stand-alone
>   /usr-partition. This could be ostree-style systems, or image-based systems
>   with the /usr-partition read-only and protected by dm-verity. We're not
>   there _yet_, but many people are experimenting with this.
>
> When one looks in /etc, many of the files there are not "configuration".
> For example, /etc/services is a list of port:service mappings, and people
> maybe used to edit that twenty years ago, but now it's just a static file
> that just as well may be somewhere under /usr/lib/. The same is also
> true for /etc/bash_completion.d/ — people do not edit completion scripts.
> Most of those have been moved to /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/,
> but there's still a dozen or so in /etc.
>

One thing that is becoming much more common is for us to ship such
static files in /usr/lib and include a default symlink in /etc for
those packages whose presence there is effectively API (for example
/etc/os-release is a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release, similarly
/etc/resolv.conf). I think this is a very good approach and one that
we should probably look at formalizing in the packaging guidelines.

That being said, there are files like /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/pam.d/*
and /etc/fstab which are both API *and* sometimes see manual updates.
These are some of the cases that are going to make getting to an empty
/etc very hard to finish off. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we
can take care of in the meantime, but getting the last 1% of packages
done is going to take a lot of inter-distro conversations.
--
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