On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 05:14:46PM -0500, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> Michael Rasile wrote:
> >It's funny that you mention that. I'm not a newbie to Linux but I was
> >to gentoo some months back when I did my first update and was told
> >(nicely, of course! :-))to do an etc-update. Well, I never dreamed
> >that /etc/fstab would be overwritten. Duh, this was my oversight, of
> >course, I'm not blaming anyone. But I didn't catch it so when gentoo
> >wouldn't boot, I thought the system had given up the ghost. I
> >reinstalled gentoo. I believe I must have had a lot of free time back
> >then. :-) Had I caught it, I could have simply corrected the
> >/etc/fstab overwrite and things would have been fine. I didn't go
> >back to Mandrake, however. :-))). It happened again, but the second
> >time, I was more careful. I agree with what someone said earlier, is
> >it really necessary to even offer to change /etc/fstab??
>
> /etc/fstab is a config file just like anything else in /etc. etc-update of
> dispatch-conf or any other tool you may choose to use to update your config
> files had no way to know whether changing a certain file may render your
> system unbootable.
That is really irrelevant. If a single question, buried among
dozens of others and in no way emphasized can prevent your system
from booting if you answer it the wrong way, then it needs to be
changed (or use -5 in etc-update, in which case you didn't even
really answer that particular question).
Failing to do so, whatever the technical reason, would be
inexcusable in an awful lot of people's eyes. I'd be raising it
as a banner of proof of my convictions if I caught Windows doing
something like that (actually, I have, and I did -- blowing away
my MBR without asking the first time I mistakenly tried to
install Linux first and Windows second was pretty bad).
- richard
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Richard Kilgore
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