On Sun, 2003-08-03 at 12:54, Heschi Kreinick wrote: > > > > It requires me to remember which partition is which. Possibly fine for > > programmers and hardware techs, but not so nice for users. > > This is the core of the problem. You're asking for specialized treatment for > fstab. It might be doable. OK, so that goes in, and the next question is, > what about rc.conf, and modules.d/alsa, and, and, and...
Yes, I agree with your points completely. Absolutely! However I still think that possibly a -5 on /etc/fstab shouldn't be allowed to happen at all as the machine can become highly nonfunctional. I'd suggest, as an outgrowth of this conversation, that maybe that file specifically should be skipped when using -5. That would be no worse than not doing etc-update at all, which it seems is many people's answer to this problem. Beyond that a -3 on fstab could have some special messages about being careful. That's pretty minimal programming (I think!) and would help protect, but not stop, newbies like me from hosing things up too badly. (Am I getting beyond newbie status if I've fixed this problem twice and now know not to do this, as well as having a backup plan just n case I do?) ;-) Even today I could not understand, as we are having this conversation, why the etc-update process was so fixated on replacing my hand crafted fstab file with one that had no new changes and removed all my system information, replacing it with things that were simply not true about my hardware. It seemed timely to see that one more time. As for rc.conf or modules.d/alsa, neither (to the best of my knowledge) make the machine nonfunctional. Good backups, or even just a copy of /etc which is about all I'm doing now to get around this problem, would allow a user to fix things. > So that brings us to today, where we have messages (these are the most > recent in a long series of how -5 clobbered my system) about how stupid > etc-update is. Well, yeah. It's not supposed to be smart. You're supposed to > be. I think this is a great point, but if left at this point will never remove the -5 clobbered my system messages. There will always be new users. etc-update and modules-update as Gentoo specific AFAIK actions and new users will trip a lot in the beginning. > Hope that clears things up. > -Heschi > > (PS: Mark: I may write angry-sounding emails, but generally that's just my > style. If I'm really frustrated I don't write anything at all. No hard > feelings on my side--I wrote because I thought your points, and other > people's, were worth addressing.) And I thank you for that! - Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
