[Mageia-dev] UsrMove failure

[Colin Guthrie]

'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/

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