[arch-dev-public] [ANNOUNCE] filesystem-2011.12 manual intervention required

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 12:38:11PM -0500, Dave Reisner wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 05:57:51PM +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:
>> > Hi guys,
>> >
>> > We are finalizing the move to libmonut based mount, paving the way for
>> > read-only root, by moving /etc/mtab into the filesystem package. This
>> > used to be a dynamic file generated at boot and updated at runtime,
>> > but as of the last initscripts package it was simply a symlink to
>> > /proc/self/mounts.
>> >
>> > This symlink was created at boot (at the same place the old mtab was
>> > generated), but this turned out to cause a few problems.
>> >
>> > Sadly, moving the symlink to 'filesystem' requires user intervention,
>> > which I will write a news item about. The essential message will be:
>> >
>> > "Please upgrade the filesystem package using 'pacman -Sf filesystem'
>> > in order to overwrite /etc/mtab."
>>
>> I'd prefer to ask people to rm /etc/mtab and -Su, rather than advertise
>> -f (which has been removed in pacman-git, leaving only --force).
>>
>> > Please test and signoff, as I'd like to make the move to core rather quickly.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Tom
>
> Gah.. and of course saying that, and then going and doing it -- the
> missing mtab makes pacman choke on diskspace checking. --force might be
> the easier option here...

Yeah, I'll make this clear in the news item. --force is always,
always, always wrong. Except for this one time, when it is the only
solution ;-)

-t