Re: [Plash] Plash Wiki

[Mark Seaborn]

John McCabe-Dansted <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 2/5/07, Mark Seaborn <address@hidden> wrote:
> > The immediate reason for setting this up is to use it for planning new
> > development.  In particular, right now I am working on a package
> > system for installing Debian packages into Plash sandboxes.  There is
> > more information on the wiki:
> > http://plash.beasts.org/wiki/PackageSystem
> 
> Wouldn't be easier in the short term to just get Copy-on-Write
> working? Just mapping writes to /usr, /var etc. to user-writable
> directory should work fairly well so long as the admin doesn't
> uninstall/reconfigure too much stuff (If the admin's writes were also
> trapped, or if the filesystem itself also implemented CoW, it could
> work perfectly).

That would make it hard to get consistent setups and to reproduce
problems running programs.  It would be dependent on whatever happens
to be installed in the host system.

I am basically assuming that every application should have its own
sandbox and have a private directory tree containing only the contents
of the packages it depends on.

It is not very difficult to implement a replacement for dpkg/APT that
only installs packages -- I've already done that part (see
http://plash.beasts.org/wiki/Story1).  Admittedly, it doesn't yet
check keys or hashes, or do versioned dependencies or Provides or
Conflicts.

Mark