> > Possible yes, desirable unsure. Others might disagree
First, I absolutely do not want perfection to be the enemy of good here and I'm interested in seeing the quick and easy fix slide in before freezes prevent it so please interpret the following as an explanation of my expectations and not a desire for immediate outcome for a resolution in my bug report. I would however like to address the question of how desirable flexibility in rescue mode is. We'll start with "desirable" is independent of "what is actually implemented" as a desire can exist for a feature without that feature existing as a feature existing is dependent on someone implementing it but the desire itself is not. Now it becomes a question of "what is desirable in Debian" and I certainly have an opinion on this matter as a very happy user of Debian since 1995. Debian is "The Universal Operating System" by its own definition. Universal has an implicit definition of flexible. I'm surprised to see that offering the user choices is not a widely agreed upon fundamental principle. My expectation from the entire Debian ecosystem is that it will let me make choices when possible even if those choices perhaps are wrong or may lead to unwanted outcomes. This is a critical part of being "universal." I'd also like to point out that derivatives of Debian that are "on rails" already exist, such as Ubuntu, and I believe also Mint, and if I was interested in a system that was not "universal" I would be using one of them instead. The very thing that makes Debian what it is, at least to me, is the flexibility and that is absolutely my expectation for its behavior from every part of it. So I really don't understand how asking the user what subvolume to mount could be undesirable aside from the level of extra effort involved in the implementation itself. As always I greatly appreciate the work everyone puts into Debian. I'm quite grateful to have such an excellent operating system I can rely on and it has well earned its place as my default choice for Linux distributions and a tool I can rely on when I'm in situations where I need a reliable base to help me conquer possibly unreliable larger systems it is the base of. Cheers to all and thank you again. On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 4:20 AM Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org> wrote: > Holger Wansing <hwans...@mailbox.org> (2025-04-21): > > The latter would be at least consistent with the behaviour of rescue > > mode for "usual filesystems" (presenting the user a list of > > possibilities, which partition to mount as root filesystem). > > > > Would it be possible, to ask the user for input, if the automatic > > tries mentioned in [1] above all fail? > > Possible yes, desirable unsure. > > Others might disagree, but I consider d-i's rescue mode a possibly helpful > tool to unstuck a system that was created via d-i (e.g. some packages > broke badly, all initramfses are corrupted, the system no longer boots, > rescue mode makes it possible to detect+mount things, deploy a fix, a > revert, a workaround, yay), and absolutely not a general purpose sysadmin > tool (grml and friends would be equipped much better for such things). > > > Cheers, > -- > Cyril Brulebois (k...@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/> > D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant >
