>> How difficult would it be to detect, 
> 
> More difficult than the guy writing the software for free felt like 
> writing. That's one fundamental problem with FOSS. (Altho that might 
> start changing given the number of people now being paid to write FOSS 
> is outweighing the number of people not paid to write FOSS.)

...which is interesting, given that SUSE is a Novell product. (Although 
we are talking about OpenSUSE here, so maybe that doesn't count?)

> Don't confuse the distro with the OS. Linux installs happily in <32M (at 
> least on my set-top box). That a distro takes more isn't a problem

It is if you wanted to use that distro. ;-)

>> Services and applications can be restarted, but the kernel really, 
>> really can't.] 
> 
> This is misleading too. If you're running a web server or a DB server, 
> the difference between restarting the services and restarting the kernel 
> is minimal. You're still not running while it's happening. And depending 
> on what component you've replaced, you very well may not have updated 
> everything you think you have. E.g., if you replace the PHP interpreter 
> with one that has security bugs fixed, you now have to restart every 
> service written in PHP to ensure that fix is in place. Which services 
> are they? You can't tell. At least with Windows locking executables that 
> are running, you can tell if an executable is in use when you update it 
> and figure out which service is using it.

...OK...but isn't this [part of] what package managers are supposed to 
manage?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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