[arch-dev-public] ArchISO FTP Installer - Round 2

[Thomas Bächler]

Dan McGee schrieb:
> And then we are back to square one- having the installer being tightly
> coupled with a particular live CD. You should be able to run the
> installer from any environment, including another distro. Obviously we
> have a lot of work to do in order to make this possible, but the above
> simple logic seems to take us in the wrong direction.

If the particular file doesn't exist, we just leave the default 
configuration alone, period.

>>  You are missing the most important problem, one which you simply can't
>> dismiss by saying it's the user's problem:
>>  The ordering in which drivers for several controllers are loaded is
>> changing with kernel updates, udev updates, or even randomly between
>> reboots. Almost everyone has several controllers (for example, one onboard
>> sata, one onboard ide, or in my case, one onboard sata, one onboard ide, one
>> pci ide). When sda becomdes sdc at the next boot, and is then sdb and then
>> sda again, then we have a basically unusable distribution. This is the issue
>> we should be concentrating on (I proposed several alternatives already), not
>> the ide vs. pata issue, which is - as mentioned - easily solved.
> 
> I don't dismiss this as the users problem. Instead, I take a look at
> my own fstab which was recommended by us quite some time ago:
> # <file system>  <dir>       <type>    <options>                 <dump> <pass>
> none             /dev/pts    devpts   defaults                     0      0
> none             /dev/shm    tmpfs    defaults                     0      0
> 
> #/dev/hdc         /media/cd0  iso9660  user,ro,noauto,unhide        0      0
> #/dev/hdd         /media/cd1  iso9660  user,ro,noauto,unhide        0      0
> #/dev/hdc         /media/dvd  udf      user,ro,noauto,unhide        0      0
> #/dev/fd0         /media/fl   auto     user,noauto                  0      0
> LABEL=hdroot     /           ext3     defaults                     0      1
> LABEL=hdboot     /boot       ext2     defaults                     0      2
> LABEL=swapspace  swap        swap     defaults                     0      0
> 
> Now why aren't we doing something like this instead? Obviously the
> links in /dev/disk/by-* would work just fine here. I can boot this
> system with either IDE or PATA (which only works 50% of the time), but
> the drives are all mounted correctly and in the right places.

Which was one of my suggestions, only I wouldn't use labels, but uuids 
(not every partition has a label, all have uuids).

However, every other udev update breaks labels and uuids for 
device-mapper devices (like lvm), so we'd need exceptions for those 
(they have persistant names anyway) ... all not that pretty.

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