Request to re-add option to disable SELinux

Dmitry Butskoy buc at odusz.so-cdu.ru
Mon Jul 7 12:01:33 UTC 2008


Suren Karapetyan wrote:
> I'm no expert of SELinux, but I do have a good understanding of what it
> does (at least currently).
> And I agree: it's much more useful on the desktop than (BTW. don't laugh
> at me when I mess with then/than) on the server (tune at a bit and it
> can prevent social engineering).
> But it's not useful to me.
> And I understand I'm not the only user and it's OK if I don't like
> something, others may like/want/need it.
> But Fedora is about Freedom... 

The real life is more prosaic. Fedora is more "sponsored by Red Hat" 
rather than "totally" Freedom. And since RH had decided to promote 
SELinux, we are compelled to follow them in this.

In other words -- It is not useful (for now) to propose an ability for 
the average or even end user to install Fedora without SELinux. The 
useful thing you can do is to write a faq or a wiki page with 
description how to disable SELinux after install (and why it might be 
useful at all), then point people to this resource (fe. at 
http://www.fedorafaq.org ) ...

> And we are making increasingly harder to make non-standard choice.
>   

Let's imagine a community of users, who need such a non-standard choices 
in general. Could such a community be capable to provide their own Linux 
distro, suitable for production environments? Seems no. It requires some 
sponsor (or some commercial basis) for success.

Most cases the commerce in Linux is the support of users. And certainly 
such a commerce "wants" the users to be as typical as possible. Hence it 
seems not a good idea to allow them a lot of possible options, which 
they could occasionally set and complicate the life of their supporting 
engineer...

Certainly having the ability of non-standard choice is the good idea, 
but the market does not like it... :-/


~buc




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