Day: GNOME OS

So you're just wrong about the systemwide configuration bit; concretely, it will absolutely be possible to change say /etc/passwdqc.conf and have that apply to every root you boot into.

On the "live updates" part: Absolutely nothing precludes having a mechanism which attempts to apply "live" updates from the new root to the currently running system. In fact, one could trivally reproduce the semantics that dpkg/RPM provide by just doing a "rsync --delete /ostree/trees/new/ /ostree/trees/current/" underneath the bind mount.

But the point is that comes *afterwards*. Make operations safe by default, and optimize later. But remember - there's lots of evil race conditions that happen on "live" updates as package managers do today.

Also remember that I fully intend to allow having a hybrid OSTree+package model, where you have a base system (basically ostree+dependencies) that must be updated atomically, but everything else can be mutated at runtime, if you like.