Hello, what should package that require a specific device file do in their postinst ?
Many packages verify that the device does not exist and verify that /dev/MAKEDEV exists and do "cd /dev && ./MAKEDEV something" only in that case. This works well in most cases but if you're using udev when installing the package, MAKEDEV will not be called and the device has no chance to be created on the on-disk filesystem. If you later remove udev, you will have a broken system since the device won't be present. Note that MAKEDEV has code to create the device in /dev/.static/dev/ if that's a mount point and if udev is used. Fixing this requires: 1/ udev to keep mounting the on-disk /dev on /dev/.static/dev 2/ fix packages to always call /dev/MAKEDEV if it exists (udev ensures it exists either as symlink to the real one or to /bin/true if makedev is not installed) Should we do this? In any case, I would like the result of this discussion to be summarized in a README.Debian in makedev at the very least and possibly in the Debian policy too. In that case, it should be mentionned that depending on makedev is not necessary but that calling it on systems that have it should always be done to support users that don't use udev. In general this is not a very important scenario but I just stumbled on the problem indirectly because I have a customized debian-installer where chroots/virtual-machines are created during install and debian-installer mount --bind his own udev-based /dev on /target/dev during initial installation. When I reboot on the target system (that does not have udev), the vtun service was not working properly (because its postinst does not run MAKEDEV since /dev/net/tun was already existing). Note that debian-installer was trying to do well and was mounting the underlying /target/dev as /target/dev/.static/dev but the current code is not working (see #585133). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Like what I do? Sponsor me: http://ouaza.com/wp/2010/01/05/5-years-of-freexian/ My Debian goals: http://ouaza.com/wp/2010/01/09/debian-related-goals-for-2010/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100609150436.ga26...@rivendell
