Your position sounds reasonable to me, overall. I disagree, however, because I don't want a system that is exactly what an old-school person like ourselves expects from rm. Instead, I want the automagical versioned backup filesystem (amvbfs?) in which rm does not actually free any space, does not actually delete any data, but really just adds a new zero-byte version-of-a-file on top of the stack of existing versions-of-that-file. I also want certain system-level utilities (I'm particularly thinking of /sbin/undelete at the moment) that will survive rm rf of the entire drive. Now, as an old-school person, that behavior is *definitely* not like what I would expect, from my previous work with rm, but it *is* pretty close to what I would really want.
As for XMir and VT, our expectations are similar, and our analysis is similar... where we differ is that it sounds like you want XMir to be finished now, and I think XMir is still very much in beta and thus fluid. In other words, it is still under heavy development, and until 13.10 has been debugged, and the final kinks worked out for what ships with 14.04, I'm reserving judgement on whether Mir/Xmir are going to offer something relatively (to Xorg) secure speedy stable shiny useful intuitive et cetera. Here is the blog of one of the mir/xmir folks that is particularly interested in fixing up terminal-switching. https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/ See particularly the Sane Session-Switching and the How VT-switching Works. Do you see serious problems with what he's talking about in those, security or otherwise? That's where mir&xmir are heading, from what I can grok, which is *not* necessarily the same thing as where the beta release-early-release-often codebase actually is right now.
The 'racy one' used now is just a prophylactic, to prevent 99.9% of security-pregnancies. If you are in one of those 0.1% situations that you describe, where firefox is hanging up X, and you think you might have left your cursor-focus in an IM chat window, the workaround is to unplug your LAN cable (or use Fn+F12 or somesuch to power off your wifi). But be fair here: 99.9% of the time, the racy band-aid keeps the typical enduser from shooting themselves in the foot. That's good enough for beta stuff, which is what Mir is, really. If they *keep* using the racy band-aid indefinitely, then I agree that's not a Good Thing, but that remains to be seen.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Link to where mir's vt-switching is being designed
Date: 2013-10-08 01:20 pm (UTC)As for XMir and VT, our expectations are similar, and our analysis is similar... where we differ is that it sounds like you want XMir to be finished now, and I think XMir is still very much in beta and thus fluid. In other words, it is still under heavy development, and until 13.10 has been debugged, and the final kinks worked out for what ships with 14.04, I'm reserving judgement on whether Mir/Xmir are going to offer something relatively (to Xorg) secure speedy stable shiny useful intuitive et cetera. Here is the blog of one of the mir/xmir folks that is particularly interested in fixing up terminal-switching. https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/ See particularly the Sane Session-Switching and the How VT-switching Works. Do you see serious problems with what he's talking about in those, security or otherwise? That's where mir&xmir are heading, from what I can grok, which is *not* necessarily the same thing as where the beta release-early-release-often codebase actually is right now.
The 'racy one' used now is just a prophylactic, to prevent 99.9% of security-pregnancies. If you are in one of those 0.1% situations that you describe, where firefox is hanging up X, and you think you might have left your cursor-focus in an IM chat window, the workaround is to unplug your LAN cable (or use Fn+F12 or somesuch to power off your wifi). But be fair here: 99.9% of the time, the racy band-aid keeps the typical enduser from shooting themselves in the foot. That's good enough for beta stuff, which is what Mir is, really. If they *keep* using the racy band-aid indefinitely, then I agree that's not a Good Thing, but that remains to be seen.