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List:       busybox
Subject:    Re: [PATCH] mount: support -i;
From:       Rob Landley <rob () landley ! net>
Date:       2009-06-19 19:50:14
Message-ID: 200906191450.15881.rob () landley ! net
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On Friday 19 June 2009 03:40:29 Colin Watson wrote:

>Historically /etc/mtab couldn't be made a symlink because some
>information was missing from /proc/mounts, which was particularly
>relevant for the handling of loop devices. It's only relatively recently
>(Linux 2.6.26) that /proc/mounts has been useful. I think there may even
>still be some problems with this:
>http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=531371 has some more
>information.

The busybox mount command got that one right back in 2006, using /proc/mounts.  
(Also, you don't need to specify -o loop with the busybox mount command, it 
autodetects when that's needed.)

I know because I'm the one who wrote that code. :)

> We probably will move to /etc/mtab as a symlink (cf.
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=494001) but we won't do
> it just because of a busybox bug. When you have production systems
> depending on existing behaviour, a certain amount of caution and trying
> to ensure that you've covered all the bases is appropriate.

Sure, I was just surprised.  I've just been a bit out of the loop since about 
2006, and busybox's mtab support was already deprecated legacy code back then.  
I thought it would have gone away by now.  (Then again, I see that busybox 
still has devfsd, and that was also deprecated back then.  Sigh.  We haven't 
got anything similar to feature-removal-schedule.txt...)

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds
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