[arch-dev-public] [RFC] filesystem-2012.3-1

[Dave Reisner]

On Sat, Jun 02, 2012 at 11:45:26PM +0200, Tom Gundersen wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> We want to tidy up the /var/{lock,run} situation. They should be
> symlinks to /run{,/lock}.
> 
> Currently they are shipped as regular directories in the filesystem
> package, and on the next boot they are replaced by symlinks (by
> initscripts). It has been like this for about a year, and I'd like to
> fix this up properly by shipping the symlinks in the filesystem
> package.
> 
> The upgrade requires user intervention:
> 
> # rm /var/{lock,run} ; pacman -Syu

As you pointed out, this assumes that the machine was booted at least
once on "recent" initscripts. If they're still directories, I suppose
this gets a bit more fun -- subdirs, files, sockets, whatever will need
to be moved into /run first.

> Deleting these symlinks/folders on a running system might have
> unintended side effects, but as far as we have been able to figure out
> nothing fatal. To be on the safe side, I think we should (in a news
> item) advice users to shut down anything going on in the background to
> the extent possible before doing the upgrade and reboot after the
> upgrade is finished.
> 
> Any thoughts on this?
> 
> A request: it would be really ideal if we could roll a new installer
> release as soon as this is out, so people don't have to deal with
> these sorts of things on their first upgrade after install. Would that
> be possible?

There's a lot of reasons we need a new core installer. Note that the
netinstall isn't affected by this.

d