Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)
On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Marek Habersack wrote:
> * Dale Scheetz said:
>
> > > On the other hand, Debian's documentation on what to do when the
> > > system goes south is rather limited.
> >
> > I have apparently misunderstood the trust of the proposal then. I thought
> > the desire being expressed on this thread was to make it so the install
> > _couldn't_ break in the fashion we have seen with bash.
> Well, as far as I am concerned, I worry about bash and a basic set of
> utilities, not about install, apt, dpkg etc. In case of failure you must
> have an operable shell and at least a few utilities: ln, cp, mv, tar, mount,
> some reasonable editor. Yes, sash has most of them, that's good - but sash
> won't work when init breaks (yes, I can hear you saying "you can always pass
> the 'init=/bin/sash' parameter to the kernel - and it is IMPOSSIBLE to do
> when you use a standard LILO installation - it doesn't allow the user to
> provide kernel params, it's not interactive). So, see my suggestion in one
> of the earlier mails to provide a selection for the bootmanager menu to
> invoke it just with one line entered on the bootprompt and a static init and
> sash. Is my suggestion so stupid it cannot be taken upon consideration?
No, but I'm not sure just how much it helps. What you really need is an
sulogin that uses sash and no init, as you are most likely to desire
single user mode for repairs anyway.
It would certainly be a "good thing" to have a default already set up for
LILO that would allow rebooting into the rescue system.
>
> > > [We do have a "boot with the rescue disk" comment somewhere, but
> > > there's no signficant cookbook of advice for dealing with common
> > > situations, and we have no useful recommendations for headless
> > > machines.]
> >
> > I remember us having this discussion just a few weeks ago under the
> > thread:
> >
> > Possible ITP: Rescue Package
> >
> > and we decided that sash was sufficient for most purposes, and that a
> > static sulogin might be useful as well as a static editor. We never
> > discussed making a static dpkg or apt, or any other "core" programs as
> > that doesn't seem to be required.
> I agree as long as dpkg, apt etc. are concerned. But init, sulogin and sash
> are a must.
>
Well, I'm still not convince that init is needed, and making it work would
be much more than trivial, as it calls all sorts of stuff that is likely
to be substantially different on every machine, due to local
modifications.
Does sash provide ar and gzip? I know it provides a tar. These are the
only tools you need to unpack a .deb by hand, so static dpkg or apt is not
required. This will also let you hand install the right binaries even when
the dependencies are broken and dpkg can't install them.
BTW, where were you when I was trying to get folks to help me define this
set of tools, you would have been a great help on that thread ;-)
Luck,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
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e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
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