Re: What to do about /etc/debian_version

[Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

>>>>> " " == Martin Keegan <mk270@cam.ac.uk> writes:

     > Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@cupid.suninternet.com> writes:

    >> Joey Hess wrote: > I think /etc/mtab is on its way out. A 2.4.x
    >> kernel with devfs has a > /proc/mounts that actually has a
    >> proper line for the root filesystem.  > Linking the two files
    >> would probably actually work on such a system > without
    >> breakage.
    >> 
    >> Does 2.4 now also include the information on which loop devices
    >> are related to which filesystems? AFAIK that's the only thing
    >> that went strange after linking /proc/mounts and /etc/mtab;
    >> loop devices not being freed after unmounting.

No. Not that I saw a change for it. How could it?  Currently when
mounting a loop device, mount writes the filename that gets attached
to the loop device into /etc/mtab and then mounts /dev/loopX. Because
/etc/mtab is read-only mount can't write the filename and thus doesn't
know what to detach when unmounting.

mount can't know the difference between
"mount -oloop file path"
and
losetup /dev/loop0 file
"mount /dev/loop0 path"

Maybe the mount or loopback interface could be changed to record that
umount has to free the loop device upon umount.

     > When doing this I had a problem with the mount programme
     > insisting on explicitly checking whether /etc/mtab were a
     > symlink and explicitly breaking if it were. Why is this?

Never had that problem.

MfG
        Goswin