udev boot delay

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

I'm not sure if this is a udev issue or a Debian issue.

After a recent upgrade to Debian testing on my laptop, which brought
udev to version 0.053, I experienced the following problem.

At the point in the boot-process where the init scripts run, I get this
message:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  It has been detected that the command:

         /etc/rcS.d/S04udev

  has been run from an interactive shell.  It will probably not do
  what you expect, so this script will wait 60 seconds before
  continuing. Press ^C to stop it.
  RUNNING THIS COMMAND IS HIGHLY DISCOURAGED!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The init process does indeed pause for 60 seconds, but everything is
fine at the end.

I found this very puzzling, since I don't believe that udev has ever
been run from an interactive shell on this machine.  I looked in
/etc/init.d/udev and found that the source of the warning was this:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
warn_if_interactive() {
  TTY=$(my_tty)
  if [ -z "$TTY" -o "$TTY" = "/dev/console" ]; then
     return
  fi
----------------------------------------------------------------------

And that explained to me why the problem arose only on the laptop and
not on the desktop machines that I manage. On the laptop (but not on
the others), I have in /etc/lilo.conf:

     append="console=/dev/tty6"

And indeed when I commented out this line, the normal boot-behaviour
was restored, the warning was not issued, and there was no 60 second
pause.

But surely this isn't reasonable behaviour? In this circumstance, the
script is being run in a routine way and there is no real sense in
which it has been run from an interactive shell.

Jim