Bug#751029: Please split kpartx off from multipath-tools

[Guido Günther]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 01:47:02PM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote:
> Package: src:multipath-tools
> Version: 0.5.0-1
> Tags: patch
> 
> Two years ago we made some changes to dmraid and multipath-tools in
> Ubuntu and I'd like to get them merged upstream.  The changes
> involve having dmraid disable its internal partition detection code,
> and rely instead on kpartx to activate partitions, since it
> understands gpt, but dmraid does not.  In the process of this, I
> noticed that there was a multipath-tools-boot package that you could
> use if you require the ability to boot from multipath, but there was
> no similar package for kpartx.  The attached patch creates a
> kpartx-boot and similar udeb packages so that those needing to boot
> from dmraid can install just kpartx without pulling in
> multipath-tools along with it.

Do we really need a kpartx-boot for that? Wouldn't it be sufficient to
split out kpartx and let the initramfs hooks of dmraid and mp handle
the rest? I don't think there's a usecase yet where one wants
kpartx in the initramfs but neither mp nor dmraid.
Cheers
 -- Guido