Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)
OK, it was a bit of a troll--but I really do set up backup roots on
important systems. I don't view them as live recovery options though,
I view them as an alternate way to reboot a failed system, if it
is hosed so badly that it won't even boot. I consider this preferable
to floppies, since they're always in the drive, and since floppies
are highly unreliable. (I have boot floppies too, or more often boot
CD's these days--I just like not having to use them).
My problem with the alternate root is you would still need at
least a couple of statics lying around to make use of it for
live recovery:
su, sh, mount
That would be an absolute minimum. You need to be able to acquire
a root shell (su and sh), and you need to be able to mount the
alternate root.
What you're effectively doing, here, though, is using the alternate
root as a place to store extra binaries. It seems much simpler to
me to just have a larger set of statics lying around in /sbin.
There's also my other issue, which has been somewhat forgotten: I
think the package manager should not depend on glibc and other
complex and frequently upgraded packages.
It bugs me that the package management system operates on things
which it depends on for its own operation. If it messes up a glibc
install, for any reason at all, then it brings itself down.
Justin
On Wed, Aug 18, 1999 at 12:03:04AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 06:00:54PM -0400, Justin Wells wrote:
> > No spare root disk is installed by default. Sash is not installed by
> > default. You are asking me to go in and stick a boot floppy into a
> > machine that I might not be anywhere near.
> [snip]
> > Note that the backrup root solution could be extremely inconvenient, as
> > it wil require me to chroot, and then remount all my drives again
> > read-write in order to access them. I'm not sure that's sane, but
> > I'm willing to be convinced that there is a reasonable way to do this.
>
> You really are a troll, aren't you. If you really believe that debian
> needs to set up backup root disks in a default installation, or that you
> need to chroot to employ said backup root disk then I'm sorry, but I can
> do nothing for you. Otherwise, shame on me for feeding the troll.
>
> Mike Stone
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