On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Thomas Bächler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dan McGee schrieb: > > The next issue is the "remember what you chose and put it in the > > system's mkinitcpio.conf". How about "No"? Why on earth do we need to > > automate things for the users as long as we document it in the install > > guide? It isn't that hard to have a one-liner saying "if you booted > > with IDE drivers, you will want to modify your mkinitcpio hooks > > accordingly. This would save us a lot of hassle from stupid automation > > tricks that I really feel we don't need to do. > > > > Because we don't want to produce broken installations, it's that easy. What > a nice experience would it be if you told yourself "let's install this new > distro" and it would just kernel panic? You would never try again, as it's a > broken piece of software. Nobody will notice a one-liner in the installation > guide, seriously. > > And this is easily fixed. When we mount the unionfs in the initrd, we just > add a file indicating which image was used to boot, and if the installer > finds that, it does a simple sed on mkinitcpio.conf. Problem solved.
And then we are back to square one- having the installer being tightly coupled with a particular live CD. You should be able to run the installer from any environment, including another distro. Obviously we have a lot of work to do in order to make this possible, but the above simple logic seems to take us in the wrong direction. > > The final issue was references to /dev/hda and such in fstab, which > > won't work for PATA drivers. Where are these even coming from? Are we > > autopopulating these, and doing it horribly wrong? > > > > The fstab is generated according to what the installer mounted, so this > isn't an issue. > > > You are missing the most important problem, one which you simply can't > dismiss by saying it's the user's problem: > The ordering in which drivers for several controllers are loaded is > changing with kernel updates, udev updates, or even randomly between > reboots. Almost everyone has several controllers (for example, one onboard > sata, one onboard ide, or in my case, one onboard sata, one onboard ide, one > pci ide). When sda becomdes sdc at the next boot, and is then sdb and then > sda again, then we have a basically unusable distribution. This is the issue > we should be concentrating on (I proposed several alternatives already), not > the ide vs. pata issue, which is - as mentioned - easily solved. I don't dismiss this as the users problem. Instead, I take a look at my own fstab which was recommended by us quite some time ago: # <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 #/dev/hdc /media/cd0 iso9660 user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/hdd /media/cd1 iso9660 user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/hdc /media/dvd udf user,ro,noauto,unhide 0 0 #/dev/fd0 /media/fl auto user,noauto 0 0 LABEL=hdroot / ext3 defaults 0 1 LABEL=hdboot /boot ext2 defaults 0 2 LABEL=swapspace swap swap defaults 0 0 Now why aren't we doing something like this instead? Obviously the links in /dev/disk/by-* would work just fine here. I can boot this system with either IDE or PATA (which only works 50% of the time), but the drives are all mounted correctly and in the right places. -Dan
