Re: Only forbid use of old alternatives to /run in wheezy+1?
On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 12:39:03PM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote:
> While I applaud the introduction of /run, I have some concerns about
> how quickly users of alternatives to /run could be required to switch
> to the new location.
>
> Consider the following scenario.
>
> Package P is using /lib/init/rw. At some point the new version of
> initscripts is installed. The latter's postinst makes /run available,
> initially as a bind mount of /var/run, post-reboot as a separate tmpfs.
> OK. But P has not been updated yet; it is still using /lib/init/rw. So
> initscripts's postinst certainly can't remove /lib/init/rw immediately.
> What if the latter merely arranges for the removal of /lib/init/rw
> after the next reboot? Then if the admin reboots, P is broken after
> the reboot until it gets upgraded. But if P is some kind of infrastructure
> package then its breakage could cause the administrator anguish.
> Note that P's maintainer can't do anything about this problem because
> it is the squeeze version of P that gets broken. The squeeze version
> of P simply didn't expect that /lib/init/rw would suddenly disappear.
/lib/init/rw isn't going to just disappear without coping with this
scenario. Given the low number of users of /lib/init/rw, it's quite
possible that we can just add a list of Breaks: P (<< fixed-version)
for each of the packages concerned (where fixed-version is the
version which switches to /run). This will ensure they are all using
/run before we remove /lib/init/rw.
We haven't made any plans to remove it yet. We'll look more closely
at the best way to do that once all the users are moved over. Given
the small number, it's quite likely this won't take very long. If
it turns out that there are other users of /lib/init/rw, it's not a
problem keeping it around for wheezy. But if there aren't, there's
no need to retain it.
If there is a cleaner method than using versioned Breaks, I'm sure we
can look at that instead--nothing concrete is planned yet for the
removal, so all suggestions are welcome.
Regards,
Roger
--
.''`. Roger Leigh
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