Things to remove from /rescue

[Peter Jeremy]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 02:25:32AM -0400, Adam C. Migus wrote:
>The whole change to dynamic linking for / is a move to "modernize"
>FreeBSD.  Thus /rescue is a "modern" attempt at creating a /stand. 
>If we're going to be "modern" we ought to think about what "modern"
>sysadmins need to "rescue" their systems.

What do you mean by a "modern" sysadmin?  Do you mean people who
believe everything should be done via a GUI and would be lost if
presented with a shell prompt?

>/rescue to me implies "what's needed to rescue you're hosed FreeBSD
>system."

Actually /rescue is only needed when you've managed to hose your
/lib, /bin or /sbin directories.  If you haven't damaged your root
filesystem, you can use all the utilities in /bin and /sbin.  If
your root is totally hosed, you need to boot from alternate media
(eg a fixit CD-ROM).

Excluding hamfisted sysadmins pointing "rm" at the wrong directory,
/rescue is probably going to be of most use to developers who have
managed to a "make world" at an inopportune time and installed a
non-functional ld.so or similar.

>Finally, this argument essentially comes down to space savings vs.
>ability to rescue the system.  Is 100K of disk space worth 2 hours
>of time due to a missing tool?

Any missing tool is probably available on the fixit CD-ROM.

>Why not make the set of tools in /rescue easily configurable and
>divide them into three sets:
>
>1. Those that are in the crunch and linked in /rescue,
>2. Those that are in the crunch but aren't linked in /rescue, and
>3. Those that aren't yet in the crunch.
>
>The first being tools everyone agrees are valuable, the second being
>tools that at least one person thinks might be useful (not in excess
>of what's there now), the last being tools everyone can agree are
>useless (and thus aren't there now).

There doesn't seem to be any reason for the second category.  The
prime driver for /rescue is size.  Once you've included a utility
within the crunch, you've taken the size hit so you might as well
include the link.

>That way if an administrator complains about a missing tool someone
>said might be useful, the answer is "just create a link."

And the administrator has a whinge about the #$@!%@* idiots who
made him waste hours waiting for a response to his e-mail when they
could have created the link to start with.  This doesn't strike me
as being of benefit to anyone.

Peter