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

[Roger Leigh]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 09:13:35AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> 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.

No defaults in rcS have been changed (from a squeeze to wheezy upgrade
POV).  We did add some new ones transiently in testing before moving
them to /etc/default/tmpfs, and removed UTC, but the defaults present
in squeeze are unchanged.  However, this change has permitted rcS to
become a regular conffile, so now at least we have the /possibilty/
of updating it to change the defaults sanely.

> 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.

[...]
> 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.

That would be useful.  I think the main issue is Henrique's point that
it's not always safe to run fsck when using lvm/md on unreconstructed
arrays/volumes.  That could result in dataloss.  That said, such things
should normally be detectable: normally isn't there an md superblock
which should make the partition detectable as a part of a RAID set,
rather than a fsck-able filesystem?  Likewise with LVM PVs.

I guess it's a balance between whether we get more dataloss if FSCKFIX=
yes or no.


Regards,
Roger

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