Things to remove from /rescue

[Adam C. Migus]

Peter Jeremy said:
> 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"acquire
>>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?
>
negligibleconvenient
My apologies if this comment offends you based on what it doesn't
say.  A "modern" sysadmin could, I suppose fit, your description or
could simply be a very intelligent young person six months out of
college who has yet to aquire the skills of a more experienced
sysadmin.  I suppose it could also be an office administrator forced
to become a system administrator due to downsizing at his or her
company.

>>/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.
>

Ok, to rephrase: "what's needed to rescue your (fix the typo while
I'm here) hosed FreeBSD system, which you hosed by toasting your
/lib."

>>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.
>

What if you don't have a 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
>

I really think you missed the whole point of the post.  I didn't
post to argue.  I posted a solution that provides a way to allow the
FreeBSD community to trim or grow /rescue to fit the needs of it's
users.  The space savings is negligable on most systems and making
the list of programs easily configurable is a convienient way of
limiting the size for systems in which space is critical.

--
Adam - (http://people.migus.org/~amigus/)
Migus Dot Org - (http://www.migus.org/)