Bug#494001: debian-installer: /etc/mtab must be a symlink to /proc/mounts with linux >= 2.6.26
> [please CC the submitter as well as the bug number, or else they don't
> get a reply!]
Oops, sorry. For now, it's To: you plus cc to BTS. Should I cc debian-boot
as well?
> Do you have any examples of packages which use /etc/mtab in this way?
No. But...
> I checked KDE 3.5.5 and it seems to be working fine. Note that inotify
> is very new, is Linux-specific, and all of the common desktop
> environments are portable to many different platforms and hence will
> detect changes using mechanisms other than inotify. IMO this is not
> a stopper for moving to a symlink.
... inotify is probably going to stay with us. Being better than polling, many
packages might just consider switching to inotify (since it is a new thing). Not
the huge ones like KDE and Gnome and the like (they have dbus/hal). Smaller
packages which do not want to use dbus/hal would have little choice after
this change.
It's not only that inotify was imho introduced just to deal with this kind of
things, but the kernel developers are also considering to move away from
atime. Plus, support for mount/umount events was dropped from udev...
Aside from Gnome/KDE/..., I guess it isn't so much of a problem of inotify being
Linux-specific, many of the smaller packages often don't even think of being
portable to other kernels.
I perfectly understand your reasons, but please do consider waiting with this
change, speaking to the kernel people about inotify support in (parts of) /proc,
or... whatever. I admit, I don't have a really good solution ready.
Regards,
Radim
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