it is terse on purpose, it is a 2 liner in the sense that not too much info scrolls off, we need it for the bug report. it has been shown that user think that those last lines are _bug_ relevant!? if you enhance current text in 2 lines i'd be happy to reconsider.
Thanks for your reply, I was not sure what the constraints are. So you're saying the user thinks these lines are part of the error message? I think that might be in part because the panic() line is printed after the "helpful advice" message. I doubt that much can be done about that, unless panic() can print multiple lines of warning messages. Is the attached version any better? Hopefully the text is not too wide now. If it still doesn't fit, let's drop it. Cheers Vince
--- /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local.old 2006-10-17 17:26:59.000000000 +1000 +++ /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local 2007-03-13 09:58:02.000000000 +1100 @@ -40,8 +40,9 @@ # We've given up, but we'll let the user fix matters if they can while [ ! -e "${ROOT}" ]; do - echo " Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline" - echo " or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev" + echo " Check your root= boot argument (run 'cat /proc/cmdline')" + echo " Check for missing modules (cat /proc/modules), or device files (ls /dev)" panic "ALERT! ${ROOT} does not exist. Dropping to a shell!" done