suggestion: rescue boot extension

[Jon Masters]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 15:54 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jon Masters (jonathan at jonmasters.org) said: 
> > There are various projects implementing LiveCD, rescue, or snapshotted
> > updates. I would like to propose a feature in which some of the
> > rescue/LiveCD bits are (optionally) installed to a spare volume during
> > install such that there's always a rescue/Live boot option that can boot
> > up to a recovery desktop without needing to grab media, etc.
> > 
> > Modern disks are large and cheap (even some SSDs). I can't see a
> > downside and it helps with all manner of botched updates. Snapshots help
> > aswell, but there are many times where you just want something more than
> > a single user boot to fix some breakage.
> 
> Hm. I can see the use of this, but I can also see issues with how you
> do updates for it sanely (if at all.)

Yea. I think you don't do updates for it in general. I think I agree
with Seth that this is something Anaconda stuffs in place when it
installs grub. Optionally, maybe you upgrade it once per release when
you next run Anaconda, but basically it doesn't change. It's about "get
me booted to more than a command line to fix stuff", not latest glitz.

That said, of course eventually you could have two of these images and
allow for them to be upgraded, etc. etc. To start with though, I think
there's a lot of value in pre-committing a couple hundred MB of disk
space to having a rescue environment always on.

Jon.