On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Thomas Bächler wrote:
Am 10.02.2010 21:30, schrieb Dimitrios Apostolou:Guys that thing bit me again: During the big libpng upgrade "initscripts" package got upgraded too and /etc/rc.{sysinit,shutdown} got overwritten without notifying me. Because of special changes I've made to mount /var as tmpfs, and because I forgot to put the files in the NoUpgrade line of pacman.conf, the system was unbootable and after fixing it pacman wants to download 500MB of packages again (ideas?). :-@Can't pacman just emit a big fat warning like: WARNING: /etc/rc.sysinit USER CHANGES OVERWRITTEN Since this case is extremely rare, the message would appear scarcely. I can't thing of anything negative for such a feature.This will definitely not happen. pacman will only notify you on files that are marked as "backup" in the package and thus listed in pacman -Qii! All other will be overwritten without a warning (pacman doesn't know you modified them). rc.{sysinit,shutdown} are not supposed to be
Thanks for the info, so it's not a matter of policy but I now see it's technically not feasible... I wish this was mentioned before. I now noticed that pacman stores the checksums of files in the %PACMAN% array inside "files" file. I somehow was under the impression that no checksums were needed, only the timestams inside the installation tarball.
modified by the user - if you still want to do that, the NoUpgrade feature of pacman will do the job, but then you are completely on your own (Arch gives you all freedom you want, as long as you know you and only you are to blame for problems)! You should try to make your changes work inside Arch: 1) If your changes are general enough to make it into the mainstream initscripts as a feature (or an optional one), submit a feature request with a patch against latest git. 2) If your changes are for local usage only, try to integrate them with the new initscripts hooks system. You can also request to add more hooks to be added in initscripts, just open a feature request. The hooks system is explained in the comments in /etc/rc.d/functions.
My patch is only 3 lines before any other initialisation has taken place, and copies /var from disk to tmpfs. I'm using it on my Eee 901 for over one year, but it's really custom and non-portable. I didn't know about the new hooks system, I think I like it. When I find some time to port my 3-lines patch to it, I'll post it here in case someone else needs it.
Dimitris
