Samuli Suominen posted on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:04:19 +0200 as excerpted:
On 23/01/13 21:06, Felix Kuperjans wrote:
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Felix Kuperjans
fe...@desaster-games.com wrote:
Samuli Suominen wrote:
please review this news item
/dev/root is no longer available in this udev version
I suggest including in the news item, that /dev/root must be replaced
with the actual root device or LABEL=..., UUID=... and the like in
/etc/fstab.
Well, *if* a line with /dev/root is present in /etc/fstab, the system
does not boot up properly (tested it right now).
I always though such a line in /etc/fstab is needed so that fsck is run
on the root filesystem...
Removing the line completely boots up fine, but the filesystem has not
been fscked on boot.
I don't think we ever instructed users for adding such line... if we
did, I'll eat my words.
So, I don't think it's necessary to instruct them away from it either,
never seen such fstab line.
Well technically, we used (and still use, see below) the uppercase
/dev/ROOT, with instructions documenting what to replace it with. But
some users apparently simply lowercased that ROOT, and for years it just
worked. (Below output edited slightly for posting. $ indicates the
shell prompt.):
$equery b fstab
* Searching for fstab ...
sys-apps/baselayout-2.2 (/usr/share/baselayout/fstab)
$grep -i /dev/root /usr/share/baselayout/fstab
/dev/ROOT /ext3 noatime 0 1
$
[TLDR folks can stop there. The rest is historic observation, arguably
interesting, admittedly ranty, but not vital.]
Years ago (remember, my first successful gentoo install was 2004.1), the
fstab example file found in /usr/share/baselayout/fstab was packaged as
/etc/fstab directly. Now, the handbook of the era took great pains to
guide people thru editing it appropriately, saying the ALLCAPS entries
were intended to be replaced as appropriate for the individual install,
AND people were expected to actually use etc-update or the like for its
intended purpose, so people weren't /supposed/ to have it simply
overwritten.
Unfortunately, a lot of folks (sarcasm yes, gentooers, could you
believe it? /sarcasm) couldn't read instructions properly, and I'd say
gentoo-user averaged at least two threads a month from folks who had
killed their fstab with an update and a simple etc-update direct-replace,
or couldn't get gentoo self-booting in the first place due to not editing
the file at all, despite the instructions to do so.
And I'm sure many more read the threads on the list and in the forums,
and didn't make a mistake they otherwise would have... I know I
certainly did. I've said before that I was actively helping people on
the lists well before I got my own gentoo system up and running. (Turned
out there was a bug in at least amd64's 2004.0 handling of the then still
new NPTL, that I ran into somewhere along the way. I don't know what the
fix was, but 2004.1 installed just fine from stage-1, so it must have
been fixed... As a result, I was active on the lists for several months
before I actually got my own install working, by which time I knew the
documentation pretty well, given the help I was giving to others based on
it the whole time.)
Some of us were actually rather sad to see the file moved to /usr/share,
since with it working as it did, gentoo newbies tended to learn to
actually pay attention to the instructions reasonably early on, after
being pointed to them. As I've said before, it was well known and
frequently posted in the user lists back then that gentoo wasn't a
handholding distribution. Gentooers, as sysadmins of their own systems,
were expected to take responsibility for them, reading instructions,
etc. If they preferred not to or couldn't learn to do so after a couple
mistakes like that, well, there were (and are still) other distributions
more suited to them, and in all seriousness, not to put people down but
simply to recommend a distro that would be a better fit for them, it
wasn't rare at all to see a recommendation that people seriously assess
whether they wanted to take on that responsibility, and if not, they
really should be on a different distro, as gentoo definitely wasn't for
them!
So a /dev/ROOT entry was and actually still is part of the default fstab,
it's just that the baselayout package places that fstab elsewhere, these
days.
Evidently, some users saw the example and simply lowercased that
/dev/ROOT entry into /dev/root, despite the handbook specifically
recommending replacing it with the appropriate /dev/[sh]daX parameter,
and because of the kernel/devfs/udev entry for that, it just worked.
Now that long stale entry is beginning to cause issues.
Meanwhile, if we still shipped /etc/fstab directly, as back then, I
expect we'd have way less troubles with people not paying attention to
instructions and trying to foist their responsibilities as sysadmin
