[Debootloaders-yaboot] Bug#587290: Bug#587290: How does linux-base modify /etc/yaboot.conf ?

[Ben Hutchings]

On Mon, 2010-09-20 at 01:48 +0200, Benjamin Cama wrote:
[...]
> > I could change linux-base.postinst to avoid adding space between name,
> > '=' and value when updating the configuration but it seems simple enough
> > to make ybin accept that too.
> 
> Yes, it's simple. And I think you can't avoid the quotes, because of
> spaces ? (I bet some people put spaces in FS labels ?). So yes, ybin
> needs fixing, I'll try having a look at that (and Rick's code).

The quotes are needed because of the '=' sign, not because of spaces.
Spaces in labels are possible but extremely problematic, so
linux-base.postinst will never try to use such labels.

> BTW, I'm very curious why we didn't get hit by that earlier. It seems
> your code affected yaboot around the time Debian switched to mandatory
> UUID/labels, right ?

I believe that the installer has used UUIDs in most configuration files
starting with lenny, but there may be exceptions to this.  The reason
for the recent transition is the change in PATA/IDE drivers which causes
their device names to change, but even on systems without any PATA
devices SCSI device names are unstable.

> Is your script only triggered for that ? Is it only
> done once during the transition (as seems to imply the function's name
> from where it's called in your perl code) or on every kernel upgrade ?

It should only run once, unless the user explicitly reconfigures the
linux-base package (dpkg-reconfigure).

> > Yes, all parts of yaboot should really be using the same configuration
> > parser.  Reimplementing it is crazy.
> 
> Well, I'm not sure anyone is able/willing to do that here… Let's just
> fix the most obvious bug for now, right ?

Right, I'm just saying that that would be the ideal.

> > By the way, I think this bug should be merged with #580455.
> 
> Tried doing it, but didn't work; should I rather forcemerge or try
> setting both to the same severity first ? (I don't like messing with so
> high severity when it's not my bugs)

Either will work.  'forcemerge' will set all the merged bugs to the
severity of the first one you specify.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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