Re: Using the host /etc in the runtime

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015, at 04:37 AM, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> I disagree, for several reasons. First of all the end goal is fully
> sandboxed applications. In this case leaking anything at all from the
> host os is bad, but leaking /etc/passwd, etc is pretty damn bad.

Leaking /etc/shadow would be bad, /etc/passwd...eh.

> Secondly, the other goal is to ensure one app+runtime works on *any*
> system. 

"works" will depend on one's PoV; for some organizations, this TLS
certificate issue will be quite important.

And even if there was just one distribution layout (e.g. /etc/pki was
standard), one still has to account for version skew over time.  Say that
an app wants to look for some new system configuration - for example,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/CryptoPolicy

It'd be possible for the app runtime's openssl/gnutls to have this change,
but the target system not.  That's a case where the shared libraries
inside runtimes would need to be prepared to handle arbitrarily old
content in /etc, or alternatively, some sort of versioned ABI, so xdg-app
would error out if the app's runtime required too new of a host.