[linux-lvm] Debian packaging

[Russell Coker]

On 2000-12-14 16:50, Tamas Gergely wrote:
>As I noticed the LVM utilities are placed under /usr in this LVM.DEB .

That's what the old package does.

>Wouldn't it be better to use '/' as root not '/usr'?

That's what my development packages (which I have shared with no-one) do.

>I mean, it would be better to place the utilities into /sbin instead of
>/usr/sbin.

Depends.  One thing I would like to do is go through the utilities and put 
things that are needed to kickstart a system or to recover a hosed system 
into /sbin .  Then things that aren't so critical to the boot process (lvmsar 
springs to mind) belong in /usr/sbin .

>(on many systems /usr is located on an LV. But activiting/disactivating
>using vgchange is impossible after unmounting /usr)

Yes.  My package will differ quite a bit from the existing Debian package.  
Also I plan to make everything use shared libraries.  ls, cp, and mv are not 
statically linked so I don't think that there is any need for statically 
linked lvm utilities.  My lvm package will be considerably smaller than the 
current one (which is necessary for boot support).

I would appreciate any suggestions on this.  Also if anyone is brave and 
wants to beta-test my packages then I would be very interested in hearing 
from them.

One other thing, it seems that the protocol is changing often.  How should 
this be managed in Debian packages?  I had thought of doing lvm22 and lvm24 
as package names for the 2.2.x and 2.4.x kernels, but now I get the 
impression that the interfaces will change between those series.  Also 0.8.1, 
0.9, and 0.8i all seem to have different protocol versions.

This has two problems, one is that users won't know which one they need, the 
other is how to manage an upgrade of a kernel!

I was thinking that perhaps what I should do is have /sbin/lvm-ver and 
/lib/lvm-ver directories where "ver" is the version of LVM in question.  Then 
at boot time there is a script that determines the version of LVM in the 
kernel and creates sym-links from /sbin and /lib to the correct directories.  
This is REALLY ugly, but it enables a user to cleanly have a machine that can 
be booted on 2.2 or 2.4 kernel and just work each time you boot it.

Any better suggestions?

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/     Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/       Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/     My home page