[arch-general] Startup scripts

[Aaron Griffin]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Tom <uebershark at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I was just forced to waste 10 min of my life because of arch-linux-way
> 'of doing things'.
>
> *rant mode on*
> Let me elaborate,
> for quite some time now, I've been unappeased by the way arch-linux
> handles the boot-up process, not so much by how it actually does it (it
> normally gets the job done) but more the fact that there's little to no
> obvious way of checking on it when things do go wrong.
>
> I've not been able to boot my custom compiled kernels since pathes 32.2
> and 32.3, I don't know why, the config is identical to my running 32.
> I am at a loss.
>
> Anyway just now, I rebooted, tested yet another kernel,
> which failed of course, just to be sat in front of my kms-enabled
> high-resolution tty1 telling me that my home-partition needed checking
> after 34 mounts. Nice feature, normally I wouldn't bother, but I was in
> a hurry, so I hit ctrl-c, and bang 'fsck failed' - well yes it did,
> because I wanted it to, - dumbass, well I go and hit 'Control-D' to
> continue, and lo and behold the machine reboots, just to get on my
> nerves again with the fsck the next round through.
> I accepted defeat then, and went and made myself a nice hot cup of tee,
>
> BUT dear arch community, this is something I hate and find so wrong on
> so many levels I cannot begin to describe them all, even m$ offered a
> way to skip these things most of the time...)
> *rant mode off*
>
> Seriously I find the systems behaviour offensive, I should be in
> control, not some half-baked script. This is exactly the same reason
> that I had to sit through fsck regulary a while back(2.6.30 or 2.6.31),
> because of some bug regarding ext4-partitions(the timestamp in future
> error), not really because of the bug, but because of the inflexibility
> of arch linux boot up scriptures.
>
> Where to go, to file that bug...

The sulogin message says:
    Give root password for system maintenance
    (or type Control-D for normal startup):

While it is a hair misleading, entering the root password at this
point gets you to your system.

Also, to shut off automatic fsck at boot. From `man fsck`:
    Filesystems with a fs_passno value of 0 are skipped and are not
checked at all.

If all this is still unsatisfactory to you, send a patch.

*rant mode on*
Since when did open source become about "do things for me"? You don't
like the way something works, so what is your answer? Filing a bug
with the hopes that someone ELSE will fix it for you? That is simply
not going to happen. You know exactly what the issue is, you know
exactly how you would fix it. So fix it and send a patch. That is the
only way this stuff will get done.

This is collaboration, people. This isn't a hand out.