[Libguestfs] [PATCH 1/3] febootstrap/helper/init: make sure /proc is mounted into chroot.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 01:29:16AM +0200, Hilko Bengen wrote:
> * Richard W.M. Jones:
> 
> > I would prefer either that we push all this stuff into libguestfs's
> > init script, or (better) that we fix the Debian packages themselves so
> > that any directories, device files etc that they need are listed in
> > the packages already and not in separate scripts.  (Fedora is just as
> > culpable about this).
> 
> Since not many people seem to be involved and interested in hacking on
> initrd systems, I think that fixing this in the distributions won't
> exactly be a short-term effort.
> 
> A few short looks at dracut and mkinitcpio (Arch Linux) show that their
> /init scripts perform essentially the same filesystem mount operations
> as the /init script from Debian's initramfs-tools described earlier. (I
> am not surprised.)

In Fedora, the same code is duplicated (with small differences/errors)
in at least 3 places: anaconda, mock, the live CD scripts.  Plus
libguestfs if you want to count that.  However this is definitely a
bug in Fedora, even if the maintainers won't fix it.

> It should be easy to implement this in a few mount(2)
> calls as part of febootstrap's /init. One could even use #ifdefs to cope
> with slightly different behavior across distributions.

The problem is that we'll end up with complex conditional C code, when
really this is better and easier done in the shell script.  The code
will also be different for every distro.

> I think febootstrap would be more useful when used for other purposes
> than building a libguestfs appliance. And there is one less possibly
> distribution-specific detail that needs to be coded into libguestfs.

Agreed.  However I still don't think fixing this in febootstrap is the
right thing to do.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw