[Mageia-dev] UsrMove failure

Tue Aug 14 13:49:35 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 14/08/12 11:13 did gyre and gimble:
+> On Tuesday 14 August 2012 11:34, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+>> I happily have e2fsck in my initrd.
+> 
+> Which was not my whole point. The average user is trained to use fsck
+> to check filesystems when this prompt comes along. Almost every guide
+> out there directed to the normal user describes running fsck, not
+> e2fsck. It is even written in the prompt text that one should run
+> fsck, not e2fsck. Either the text in the prompt should be changed or
+> fsck should be included in the initrd/dracut. I even instruct people
+> to use the TABulator to auto complete paths and filenames, to reduce
+> the risk of typos in commands. This doesn't work in the initrd
+> prompt, either. This should be fixed.
+
+Probably something worth reporting upstream to dracut maintainers then.
+I'll do this next time I speak to Harald, but if you would like to fix
+it it's probably quite trivial.
+
+> In my 12 years of using Linux, this is the first time I've had to use
+> it. It is the first time ever that the various fsck.* tools were Not
+> available. It is also the first time the up-arrow did not work in
+> command line. So any typo in commands resulted in having to manually
+> retype the entire command. Which is a royal pain in the Ass when
+> fscking multiple filesystems. No, really.
+
+You've maybe not played with very many very minimal systems as I've come
+across this kind of thing quire frequently. Having played about in
+dracut shells rather a lot of late I have to admit it's a total pain.
+
+I'll see what can be done to make this a bit more friendly.
+
+> Another problem with this new setup is that local helper scripts to
+> check filesystems is not available. My brother had Mandriva for about
+> a year. He even thinks Windows is dificult. So I made a shellscript
+> for him to run the next time he saw the fsck prompt, which would run
+> "/sbin/fsck.ext3 -y /dev/sdxx" on all partitions. This no longer
+> works in the current setup, forcing every user to manually running a
+> complicated command in the shell, with options they have never heard
+> of. I do not believe I'm alone in having to making this kind of local
+> helper scripts for users who have no intentions of learning to use
+> the command line.
+
+If such helper scripts exist and are useful, we can easily add them to a
+dracut.conf.d snippet. These config snippets can be included in the
+packages that provide these helpers rather than in dracut itself to
+allow for proper separation of need (although the complex dependancies
+may mean that we do not want to include e.g. the xfs helper (which may
+or may not pull in a lot of other tools) if you do not have any xfs
+filesystems - in which case it has to be patched into the various dracut
+modules instead of done generically.
+
+
+That said, as with your other point above, anything added to the initrd
+will make it bigger and thus delay the boot. So you have to strike a
+happy balance with having enough to be useful in a (rare) emergency case
+and small enough to be spritely during the (more frequent rebooting
+process).
+
+Col
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+