Date:        Fri, 2 Apr 1999 16:18:29 -0500 (EST)
    From:        Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.4.05.9904021545250.28146-100000@7thsun.piermont.com>

  | Now the main objection that seems to have been brought up here is
  | that some people want to share /etc among multiple machines.

Where did this red herring come from?   I saw nothing at all about sharing
/etc, which would be a pretty dumb thing to want to do.   Being able to argue
against that is no great feat.

What has been argued for is a read only /etc (read only root), which is
a totally different thing.   It isn't being read only so it can be shared,
but so the disc drive is much less likely to go writing on the thing, and
consequently, damage the root filesys on a bad power loss or similar (or
just through random filesystem inconsistencies).

The less times the root filesys needs to be written the better.

We aren't going to get to a read only state for root any time soon, but
we could at least not keep adding more stuff that is continually being
written - and most particularly stuff that non-root users can write.

kre