[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#637087: Please set FSCKFIX=yes by default

[Philip Hands]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.88dsf-22.1
Followup-For: Bug #637087

Having upgraded to wheezy recently, I note that you're changing defaults
in rcS (as exhaustively discussed elsewhere).

That being the case, there is no additional cost to fixing this bug,
as people are going to be prompted on upgrade about rcS anyway, so this
would seem to be a very good time to do it.

Perhaps I should be in favour of leaving it as it it, since I get
new customers contact me reasonably often when it turns out that the
only thing that is really wrong is that fsck needs to be run with -y.

Of course these customers generally have a load of other things
that need doing, and are running a couple of releases out of date,
so they do actually need a consultant, but quite often their hitting
Ctrl-D repeatedly at the failed fsck prompt has eventually resulted in
unnecessary data loss.

As someone that does know what one is supposed to do when seeing the
dreaded Ctrl-D prompt, I just run fsck -y anyway, and grind my teeth
at the fact that I forgot to override the default on that system.

The last time I bothered to go through the prompts of fsck to decide if I
should let it work was probably at least 15 years ago, I'm guessing back
when ext2 was the default choice, so this default doesn't serve me either.

The only disadvantage I can think of with FSCKFIX=yes is the reduced
likelihood of noticing (if you happen to understand the messages) to
notice that inodes are being dropped into lost+found -- I would think
that that could be handled by something that checks whether lost+found
is empty and mails root about it, but that is hardly a blocker.