On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Patrick Lauer <patr...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 10/14/2013 07:29 AM, Mike Gilbert wrote: >> On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Patrick Lauer <patr...@gentoo.org> wrote: >>> On 10/14/2013 03:32 AM, William Hubbs wrote: >>>> All, >>>> >>>> from what I'm seeing, we should look into converting /etc/mtab to a >>>> symlink to /proc/self/mounts [1]. >>>> >>>> Are there any remaining concerns about doing this? >>> >>> Apart from breaking umount -a and some other things? >>> None at all ;) >>> >>> (The breakage is visible e.g. with umount -a tmpfs, which used to be >>> quite useful if you had a few chroots with /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs and >>> wanted to reset them. Now it'll also punt random things like /run if >>> you're lucky - and in the past it knocked out the OpenRC state directory >>> reliably) >>> >> >> I don't follow this: it seems like umount -a is supposed to unmount >> all filesystems. umount -a -t tmpfs would unmount all tmpfs >> filesystems. /run should be included in that set, even if mtab is a >> regular file. >> > > And the magic trick is to keep "system mounts" like /run out of > /etc/mtab (willful desynchronization) so that umount -a doesn't nuke > them by accident. > > ... why else would you keep such data in two non-synchronized locations?! :D >
That's certainly a neat trick. However, it seems a bit weird to use a system-wide database for such a use case; what if multiple users are setting up mounts like this? I guess the key takeaway from this is that people do unconventional things. Probably best to just change the default, and throw up a big warning for existing users as you indicated in your original reply.
