On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 2:43 AM, Seblu <seblu@seblu.net> wrote:

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On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no> wrote:

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This is done at shutdown, so no need to repeat it here. Why removing it at boot and not at shutdown. Imagine i fix my timezone by mouting my root from nfsroot or usb key. Why i should wait a shutdown to be completed to have my new timezone?

Fair point. I should have given some more justification in the changelog. I don't actually feel strongly about this change, but I did put some thought into it:

In another thread Dave suggested adding a tool to write the module blacklist to disk at shutdown (as it cannot be done during boot due to / being ro), I think it would make sense to put the writing of timezone data also in this tool (so it becomes a "write all of rc.conf to disk in standard formats" tool). In that case the writing of timezones would have to occur at shutdown. It would therefore be weird to first move the writing to only happen at boot, and then back to only happen at shutdown, so I figured we might as well just move it to shutdown right away. I'll watch it closer.

As to your usecase of fixing rc.conf from a usb key. I think this is such a rare scenario, and the consequences of having the wrong timezone so small, that either rebooting or fixing it up by hand would be acceptable. Once we have the "write rc.conf to disk" tool it would be even simpler, as every time you edit rc.conf you could call this tool (or wait for reboot). i agree my example was a bit biased but the goal being to understand a principle which I think is important: It is expected that the configuration of a machine is done at boot, not when it goes off.

This would in particular be useful if we ever decide to support root being read only, in which case we could never write stuff to disk automatically at boot or shutdown, but would always require the user to call the tool by hand. Call the tool or configure manually all others parameters that tool will not handle. I'm not sur this tool will change something in case of ro root.

-- Sébastien Luttringer www.seblu.net