One of the periodically proposed spam solutions is that someone willissue certificates to people and if they misbehave, the certificateswill be revoked. One of the many problems with this idea is what I willcall the corporate identity problem .

The problem with corporate identities is twofold, or perhapsthreefold. First, corporate identities are much like Internetidentities : they provide only positiveidentity, that person A is associated with corporation B, not negativeidentities, that corporation B is not associated with person A. In factthere are a

To summarize my earlier entry , the problem withinitrds is that they are both fragile and opaque. To improve them,one needs to tackle both issues.

The easy way to tackle the fragility is to make initrds both morecomprehensive and more dynamic. Since one way initrds break is by notincluding necessary kernel modules, simply include nearly everythingby default (you can exclude modules that are clearly not needed forbooting, like sound drivers); the extra disk space and boot-time memoryspace needed is likely to be

So, suppose that you are tired of lying to your Makefiles and want to fix the problem (in the abstract; you can'tcompletely fix your Makefiles, because it's not fixable in anything likeordinary make ). What does this take?

What you really need to capture is the state of the 'build inputs'. Thebuild inputs are whatever goes in to creating the output, which is a lotmore than just the source files involved; it also includes things likethe test of the execution