[arch-general] [RFC] patches to initscripts

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 07.12.2010 14:30, schrieb Dieter Plaetinck:
>> The problem is: If blkid finds more than one valid signature, it will
>> not return anything, and we will mistakenly believe that there is no
>> file system (and happily overwrite the drive). This part of
>> initscripts is giving me a headache everytime I touch it.
>>
> 
> what do the util-linux-ng maintainers say about that?
> Isn't this something that should be fixed in the blkid source code?

No, that won't be fixed - at least not the way you think.

Older blkid-like tools used to report the first matched signature. That
resulted in (for example) using an ext3 file system that also happened
to have a valid swap header as swapspace, destroying the ext3 file
system. (There are tons of other examples like this, in particular, old
versions of cryptsetup and mkswap didn't wipe old existing file system
headers.) It was decided that blkid will refuse to report any ambiguous
match as a match.

I'm thinking about requesting a feature that allows to report any match,
ambiguous or not.

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