[arch-dev-public] [ANNOUNCE] initscripts-2012.07.3

[Tom Gundersen]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 8:48 AM, Evangelos Foutras
<evangelos at foutrelis.com> wrote:
> I find removing most of the variables to be confusing and would
> suggest that [1] and [2] get reverted.

I'm not going to revert them outright, but we can discuss individual
options (some clearly must go, others are a matter of taste).

> My counterargument is the nonexistence, in the previous rc.conf, of
> default options that would need to be changed in a way that is
> transparent to the user.

I guess I should have pointed out that I'd like a way to update the
comments about each of the options frequently (mainly to add warnings
or explanations as we realise them), but when the comments were in
rc.conf that would create .pacnew files, which is annoying. I'd also
like new users to have to read the manpage before they decide to use
any of the discouraged options, so they will at least know the
alternatives.

> Moreover, stuff like TIMEZONE, LOCALE and MODULES should be included
> in rc.conf; nobody really wants to run their system with the default
> LOCALE=C, and quite a few people will want to load extra modules (in
> my case vboxnetflt), without messing around with other files
> (/etc/locale.conf) or adding variables back into rc.conf,
> respectively.

I agree that most people would want to configure /etc/locale.conf and
/etc/vconsole.conf (or their equivalents in /etc/rc.conf). This is a
matter of taste, but I'd really rather we start only using the two
former files for this purpose. A benefit I did not mention yet is that
they allow a lot more options than what rc.conf ever did.

As to modules: This should really not me necessary these days, and in
the cases it is, it is something we should consider fixing. With
kernel 3.5 the last of the mainline modules that I'm aware of (kvm) no
longer needs to be specified manually.

In the case of virtualbox, I think the simplest solution here would be
to load the needed modules whenever virtualbox is installed. I.e.,
ship a file with the virtualbox package
(/usr/lib/modules-load.d/virtualbox.conf) containing

vboxnetadp
vboxnetflt

(and whatever else is needed)

> In conclusion, a) the existing rc.conf is already stripped down to the
> essential system configuration options, b) I like having a default
> structure of these options in rc.conf instead of adding them back in
> at random places (in rc.conf), c) if we want to shift the task of
> configuring the hostname/locale/keymap/etc to external files, it might
> be preferable to remove them completely from rc.conf instead of having
> multiple points of truth.

a) this is not the case. The current rc.conf contains several
redundant and at least one harmful setting (HARDWARECLOCK).

b) fair enough, though does not seem like a major issue.

c) I'd like to do this in the long-run, but we can't just rip out the
old support over night (see the old network settings or the crypttab
changes for how I'd like these things to be done).

> (The above is my view on this change after spending 10 minutes trying
> to figure out how I can load modules through /etc/modprobe.d, after I
> noticed that MODULES was removed from rc.conf. In my defense, I
> thought it could be similar to the time MOD_BLACKLIST was dropped. :p)

rc.conf(5) points to modules-load.d(5)[0].

-t

[0]: <http://0pointer.de/public/systemd-man/modules-load.d.html>