Bug#806713: disk-detect/multipath: update checks for changed mpath alias names

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

Hendrik Brueckner <brueckner@linux.vnet.ibm.com> (2015-11-30):
> Dear maintainers,
>
> An update in the multipath-tools, [1], changed the naming scheme for
> mpath aliases created when the user friendly names option is specified.
>
> The alias naming changed from mpath0 to mpatha replacing the numeric
> digits with alphabetic letters. The patch below updates the
> disk-detect.sh to correctly detect multipath devices with the new
> naming scheme.

AFAICT from the current manpage, when this option is not specified, WWID
are used instead, so there's no need to keep the [0-9] part in the
check, right? This seems confirmed by my reading of #806900 so I think
I'll push the patch to master right away.

That's perhaps right; we could possibly do away with the [0-9] part in the check. The reason for changing it to [a-z] was only to have the smallest amount of changes possible. I don't see what benefit that would really bring though, but I haven't looked at multipath in a while.

> On the people/cyphermox/mpath-detect branch in the d-i/hw-detect
> repository, there is already a patch for the same problem. I could
> not find a bug report for it. So that's why I am opening this one to
> keep this problem in mind. It would be great if you could help me to
> understand the practice on how such problem fixes becomes integrated.

Unfortunately lack of manpower means patches are sometimes not reviewed
or merged for a long time. :(

I also could have been more proactive at this; I'll update the branches shortly -- there has been further changes to partman-multipath and hw-detect to help with multipath support.

> Apart from the disk-detect package, the partman-multipath package is
> also affected by mpath naming change. I will open a separate bug report
> and attach a patch to solve the naming there.

I'll try and look at the various patches after Mathieu's reply in
#806900. I might even propose them through proposed-updates if the next
RC looks good for multipath support.

I'm sorry, I just don't see what I should be replying to? We're really not far from multipath support working (given that it does appear to work reasonably well in Ubuntu). Let me do the merges to get Ubuntu based on the right new versions of Debian, then we can do one round of reviewing all the patches.

/ Matt