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

[Philip Hands]

Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net> writes:

> 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.

So I just upgraded another system (although from wheezy of a couple of
months ago to current, rather than squeeze to wheezy) and was prompted
for changes to rcS -- is this just because the previous wheezy version
already had made the switch to conffile?

I presume that I got prompted because I had on this occasion remembered
to set FSCKFIX=yes.

I'm still failing to understand why this isn't a good opportunity to fix
the default.  It's pretty tiresome to have to preserve the FSCKFIX
setting on all upgrades, and I wonder how anyone is really going to
benefit from the current default.  In order for that to happen one seems
to need the conjunction of a regression to a bug in the RAID/LVM setup
that was fixed a decade ago, a file system failure that is fixable by
hand but not by fsck -y and an admin that's attentive and skilled enough
to perform that fix.

Meanwhile, the vast bulk of ordinary users get to find out that there's
a command called fsck when they are presented with a cryptic prompt in
an ugly text console for a root password that they've forgotten, which
makes them think that GNU/Linux is a disastrously unreliable system and
perhaps causes them scuttle for safety back with MS-Windows (which of
course does this sort of thing automatically).

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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