Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions ?

Adam Williamson adamwill at fedoraproject.org
Fri Jan 23 07:25:58 UTC 2015


On Fri, 2015-01-23 at 00:58 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> Adam Williamson composed on 2015-01-22 18:39 (UTC-0800):
> 
> > On Thu, 2015-01-22 at 21:21 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> 
> > > Not mounting as boot a partition containing kernels and/or 
> > > initrds in its
> > > root I could understand and agree with, but not forced 
> > > reformatting.
> 
> > As things stand anaconda just doesn't have this degree of 
> > precision. I think I'm right in saying nothing in anaconda looks 
> > at the actual contents of existing partitions at all. It just 
> > knows whether there's already a filesystem on the device, and 
> > whether you're reformatting it.
> 
> Even so, I don't understand what the problem is that dracut can't be 
> limited
> to producing images based on /lib/modules, name matches to the 
> installing
> arch, whatever is in the list of packages Anaconda has selected to 
> install,
> or some other kind of matching.

None of the easy ones are entirely reliable, and none of the reliable 
ones are particularly easy. anaconda does not in fact have a concept 
of 'all the files I am installing', except in live installs. Well, it 
could theoretically do a sort of 'rpm -ql' on every package it had 
installed, but that's unwieldy and extremely slow. We went through all 
the others in #anaconda yesterday, for all of them there's either a 
reason it's not easy to do or a use case it doesn't cover...there are 
some candidates that might be 'good enough', but it was one of those 
things where everything was sufficiently annoying/difficult that it 
triggered someone's 'why do we let this happen in the first place' 
reflex.


> Right, but I recall nothing in FHS that says an admin should have no 
> right

I really hate this phrasing of things in terms of 'rights', we're not 
talking about rights, we're talking about the behaviour of software. 
No-one's inflicting on anyone else's human rights, here. We're just 
trying to make software that works as well as possible.

> 
> FWIW, something is putting "theme" files in /boot even though what 
> the theme
> is for is not installed. Why aren't theme files for the bootloader 
> among the
> places other things that use themes expect to find them?

I've no idea what you're talking about here, I'm afraid...

> But, I
> do on
> occasion have use for the content I put on it both before and after 
> the first
> OS installation, as well as while the first is the only, regardless 
> of where
> it's mounted.

OK, so the case for you is that you have a process where you stick 
some bits in a partition that you then want to mount as /boot...they 
don't really *have* to be there, but it's a configuration you're 
accustomed to using?


-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net



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