Re: [e2fsprogs-1.24] "fsck -A -a" fails on reboot

[Theodore Tso <tytso mit edu>]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 09:45:17PM +0200, Michael Renner wrote:
> 
> Sorry if i explained my problem too fuzzy (eek, somebody give me a
> thesaurus), i never had any problems with the root-partition... it just
> complains that the /boot is mounted; here are my tst_ismounted results
> (which where executed right after the sulogin-login (eek again).
> 

Ah, OK.  People have been really bad about giving me bug reports.  OK,
so the problem is Slackware's boot scripts.  It *should* be doing one
of two things after checking the root filesystem:

(a) Remounting the root filesystem read-write, and then making
	/etc/mtab sane.

(b) Mounting /proc

You can do either one of these things.  Most distributions do one or
the other; some do both.  I didn't anticipate that a distribution
could be quite that stupid to not do either.

The next question then is whether I want to work around this, or
simply tell Slackware users to file a bug with their distribution.....

Fundamentally, there's nothing I can do about this.  If /etc/mtab
isn't accurate, and /proc is present, there's no way I can tell
whether or not a particular partition is mounted read-write or
read-only.  It's possible that the root could be mounted read-only,
but other filesystems are mounted read-write.  So the blanket check
that was in older e2fsprogs really was a dangerous thing.

If I put in the workaround at all, it will be as a configure option:

	--enable-dangerous-workaround-for-stupid-distributions

:-)

						- Ted