systemd not in critpath

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 09:36, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 15:43 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 7:32 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:13:48PM -0700, Garrett Holmstrom wrote:
>> >> Neither bodhi nor mash appears to consider systemd to be in the critical
>> >> path.  Why is this?  Is that the way we want it to be?
>> >>
>> > We should get that corrected.  notting has ben promising to get a script
>> > that integrates with mash and pushes the information into pkgdb where bodhi
>> > can then pull the information out.  Maybe he'll be able to give us an update
>> > on that or see if someone else familiar with mash can work on it.
>>
>> Its not the only one that's missing what should likely be classed as
>> critpath, clutter should likely be added too because gnome-shell's
>> dependency on it. I think the review of the crit path packages should
>> be part of the release process. There's likely things that are no
>> longer crit path and new things that are with each release.
>
> I'm not sure that's the intent of CRITPATH. I think the original
> definition was something on the order of "packages whose breakage can
> prevent the system from booting to a command prompt".
>
> If gnome-shell is broken, an admin can still get in on a virtual
> terminal or other window manager.

This can be more difficult than you think.

1) There is no other window manager on most systems
2) I have run into multiple GDM issues where it went into respawning
mode making going into a virtual terminal hard to impossible as you
get switched back to whatever one X is on. Most of those GDM issues
were NOT with GDM itself but with the shell chain in some way.
3) GRUB is set to no prompt on many systems meaning choosing runlevel
3 is not easy.

I have had to boot my test system several times into rescue mode to
manually 'yum update' or fix something because of the above. If we can
define outside of Critical Path as being "can be fixed by booting into
rescue mode." I think a critical path could become a lot lot smaller
:).


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren