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Re: rescue_1.102_source.changes ACCEPTED into unstable



Hi,

Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> writes:

> On 16/05/2025 at 16:49, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
>> 
>> with a tentative netinst for amd64, I deployed a laptop, full
>> disk, switching the / FS from the default ext4 to btrfs, and proceeding
>> as always for the rest.
>> 
>> Then I broke the boot by removing the initramfs.
>> 
>> Then ran d-i in (graphical) rescue mode, picked the right partition (I
>> had no idea which, but I could give it several tries), then executed a
>> shell in the installed system, `update-initramfs -c -k all` which was
>> required, and `update-grub` for peace of mind, probably not required.
>> 
>> And the system boots again.
>> 
>> I'm not going to try and compare that with earlier images, but that
>> looks to be “not entirely broken”. If that confirms what people have
>> been working on, yay.

Yes :)  Thanks for testing, since more eyes is better!

> Indeed it does, thanks for the feedback.
>
> However it may not work with a system installed from Debian live with 
> Calamares which appears to set a different btrfs subvolume layout (see 
> #1104552). I guess repair is possible in a live session but probably not 
> as automated as rescue-mode (select root partition, mount proper 
> subvolume, mount /dev, /proc, /sys...) so would it be desirable to add 
> (trivial) support for this case in d-i RC2 ?

I'm CCing Debian's Calamares maintainer, because I think this is an
upstream Calamares bug.  I hypothesise that the nature of the Calamares
bug is that upstream assumes Ubuntu-style subvolume layout that we never
intended to support in Debian.  In case anyone missed the following
reply to that bug:

> Have you been able to track down those discussions where we decided on
> @rootfs?  One of the arguments against installing to '@' was that we're
> letting Ubuntu claim that namespace, we're letting Fedora claim 'root'
> (and rootfs), and we're staying out of their way.  I was surprised to
> learn that people use btrfs in this way, but it's not that much of a
> stretch from using one VG to hold multiple distribution's LVs.
>
> Another topic in that (and subsequent) discussions is basically this:
>
>   1. Ubuntu never implemented subvolume creation, because they chose
>   ZFS.  At some point their installer began to statically create @ and
>   @home.
>   2. Fedora and SUSE implemented full support for any custom subvolume
>   topology.
>   3. Due to Ubuntu's popularity, some developers exclusively support
>   Ubuntu's static nonconfigurable default as a kind of emergent
>   bug-for-bug API.
>   4. This results in DFSG-free software having an Ubuntu-specific
>   implementation; DFSG-free software should also work on Debian, Fedora,
>   SUSE and everywhere else.  It also result in utterly wasting the time
>   and effort the Fedora and SUSE developers took to implement an actual
>   solution rather than a stop-gap measure.
>   5. Our users want our installer to have the same basic features as
>   Fedora and SUSE.
>   6. Implementing this is a waste of time if our users will only use it
>   to make their Debian systems behave like Ubuntu so that
>   Ubuntu-specific software will work on their Debian systems.
>   7. We need to support the effort for portable software.

I think we need to fix the bug in Calamares and provide a trivial
migration script to unbug affected Debian Live installations.

Cheers,
Nicholas

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