Red Hat plans on moving an installation directory
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Hi All:
I thought it would be valuable to communicate this to this group and if it does not provoke any major outcry's then to the mail-users group a bit later.
For a long time our mailman RPM's have installed all of mailman under /var/mailman (specifically both the prefix and with-var-prefix parameters to configure were set to /var/mailman). This was a packaging decision made before my tenure here and the rational for the decision seems to be lost. My personal belief is once a decision is made for where files live in a distribution there is much value in keeping that consistent as users develop expectations on where to find files.
However, we are in the process of trying to make Linux much more secure and a major component of that strategy is the introduction of a technology called SELinux (Secure Linux). SELinux has at its heart the "labeling" of files which give fine grained control over what actions specific processes operating in certain "roles" can do. To make this viable there is a tremendous advantage to having files installed in canonical locations (at a minimum conforming to the FHS, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).
The previous choice of installing all of mailman, including the scripts, libraries, executables, and cgi-bin which need to be locked down and restricted for process execution into a filesystem root (/var) which is designated to contain variable application data which is not executed was creating security policy problems.
We have made a choice to move the non-data components of mailman to /usr/lib/mailman by changing the prefix configure parameter (the with-var-prefix remains set to /var/mailman). This is closer to what some of the other distributions do.
We intend to introduce this change in the Fedora Core 3 release and the RHEL 4 release.
Since there are a number of files that admins modify (config and templates) and which the rpm installation process normally preserves on upgrade they may get "burned" because the installer is not smart enough to preserve those modified files across a new installation directory, or may simply be confused on where to find files.
The installation directory change will appear in release notes and the installation documentation (/usr/share/doc/mailman-*) however we all know how much people read these things :-). So I thought this was a valuable group to draw attention to this as its certain to come up as an issue at some point. Also, if you see some fundamentally flawed reason why this is a bad change now is the time to raise your concerns before we advance out of the beta period.
When the release goes live I will send mail to mailman-users and the Red Hat portion of the FAQ should be amended.
Thanks!
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>
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On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 12:39:13PM -0400, John Dennis wrote:
I like it. However, I believe that FHS recommends using /var/lib/mailman rather than /var/mailman for those components.
Per FHS 2.3: Applications must generally not add directories to the top level of /var. Such directories should only be added if they have some system-wide implication, and in consultation with the FHS mailing list.
An application (or a group of inter-related applications) must use a subdirectory of /var/lib for its data.
So, if you're going to make changes per FHS, change that one too...
Thanks, Matt
-- Matt Domsch Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com
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On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 12:39, John Dennis wrote:
I don't have much to add, except to say that I think it's a good thing to at least conform to FHS. To the extent that MM2's architecture makes this difficult (e.g. mm_cfg.py) if there are simple things we can do to make this possible I'm all ears. It is definitely a design goal of MM3 to be able to install all the constituent parts in the canonical locations.
-Barry
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On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 12:39:13PM -0400, John Dennis wrote:
I like it. However, I believe that FHS recommends using /var/lib/mailman rather than /var/mailman for those components.
Per FHS 2.3: Applications must generally not add directories to the top level of /var. Such directories should only be added if they have some system-wide implication, and in consultation with the FHS mailing list.
An application (or a group of inter-related applications) must use a subdirectory of /var/lib for its data.
So, if you're going to make changes per FHS, change that one too...
Thanks, Matt
-- Matt Domsch Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com
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On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 12:39, John Dennis wrote:
I don't have much to add, except to say that I think it's a good thing to at least conform to FHS. To the extent that MM2's architecture makes this difficult (e.g. mm_cfg.py) if there are simple things we can do to make this possible I'm all ears. It is definitely a design goal of MM3 to be able to install all the constituent parts in the canonical locations.
-Barry
participants (3)
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Barry Warsaw
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John Dennis
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Matt Domsch