"stable" versions

[John]

Michael Shigorin wrote:

> 
>>No silly sagas like selinux is Stable (aka Woody).  For those
>>who don't know, selinux didn't actually work in Woody though it
>>was supposed to. Croker and the others couldn't get the fixes
>>into Woody because "they are not security-related."
> 
> 
> Well the favourite selinux advice on Fedora media is "turn it off"...
> seems like it's a default even.

It was a bit of a shock to me when (on my WBEL box) I couldn't serve www 
stuff from /var/local - the standard rules prohibit Apache from doing 
that, and turning it off is very tempting.

But there are people persevering with it, and that's good for all of us.

> Still it should get more testing than being just not compiled in.
> And that's the point.

I have a Sarge box (originally Woody  I think) and I thought I'd try 
selinux on it - without reading the instructions. I installed all the 
obvious selinux stuff I could find with apt-cache. I'm not sure how 
close I am because I don't see an selinux-supporting kernel.

Having done that I noticed some missing programs I've been using on FC:
setfattr amd getfattr.

Now, I used to use OS/2 and I even tried to write some C code. OS/2 has 
always (I think) supported extended attributes. Extendaed attributes are 
used to support (properly) long file names on FAT filesystems, to store 
user data descrbing a file - EPM (a text editor) can use EAs to describe 
highlighting in C code: since the C compiler doesn't understand EAs, it 
ignores them when compiling the code. They're also used to attach icons 
to objects (typically but not necessarily files and directories), and to 
describe subclasses of files and directories such as wordprocessor 
documents.

And the kernel supports searching directories using these extended 
attributes as search arguments: it could return a list of MSWord 
documents _even if_ they didn't have names ending on .DOC.


Anyway, I'm a great fan of EAs and I have started using them in a script 
or to to store information about files, and these programs are the 
commandline tools to do it.

Also, EAs are used on Linux to support ACLs and by selinux.

So I figure my Sarge box isn't close to working yet.

I _must_ upgrade my Warty box<->.