Package: initramfs-tools Version: 0.140 Severity: wishlist When the config files specify MODULES=dep, update-initramfs tries to autodetect which modules to load. To do this, all of /proc/, /sys/, and /dev/ must be mounted. If either /proc/ or /sys/ isn't mounted, update-initramfs fails with an error message which explicitly mentions a filename in /proc/ or /sys/, cluing the user in to what they forgot. However if /dev/ is not mounted, the error is a generic one: "mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /".
Obviously this is user error, but I think it would be helpful if update-initramfs explicitly complained about missing /dev/, or at least that it failed to find a specific file in /dev/. I think because update-initramfs is a tool you might need to run in a weird situation where you're trying to rescue a non-booting system it's perhaps worth checking for something it would clearly not make sense to check in a more average tool that can just assume the system is in a sane state. The situation where I ran into this was that on moving a disk to new hardware I needed to rebuild the initrd to get it to boot. So I booted a livecd, mounted the disk, chrooted into it and ran update-initramfs. Once I realised I'd forgotten to mount or bind-mount all these other things into the chroot it worked fine :-) thanks -- PMM
