[Grml] Re: [grml-bugs] bug#25: Wish lists for enhancing the grml configuration system

[Michael Prokop]

* Tong Sun <mlist4suntong at yahoo.com> [20070422 06:15]:

> First of all, thanks for your hard works that releases grml 0.9-7,
> and grml-small 0.3-2 recently. 

> I hope the following minor enhancements to the grml configuration
> system can make into the 1.0 release.

Preface: 1.0 is already feature freezed, we are in the bughunting
process now and rc1 will be available soon. All the extra features
have to be postponed therefore. I don't want to add any new features
anymore because we have tons of new features already, all of them
have to be carefully tested which requires lots of time.

> - support reading configuration files from NTFS partitions. Don't
>   know if it already possible, just list it here first.

I'm not aware of any filesystem limits regarding bootoption
myconfig.

> - myconfig=scan. I know by default the booting process tries to
>   mount a device labeled GRMLCFG, and do configuration from
>   there. 

>   The problem is that, in nowadays window$ world, the cooperate
>   policy will most often prevent me from change my own disk
>   label. You won't believe it, nowadays window$ world is so
>   dummy-proof that in many places I can't even change my window$
>   desktop settings.

>   So I need another automatic way to specify the grml configuration
>   device. 

So what exactly are you requesting here?  You mean you want to get a
'myconfig=scan' which searches through all available partitions for a file
config.tbz and use it then?

> - Boot-Options config.d, i.e., please define a grml configuration
>   directory. On booting all the .tbz files from within the defined
>   directory or from the config.d option, will be restored, in the
>   order by their names.

You mean like the config bootoption which does:

| restore configuration using file config.tbz from directory /cdrom/config/

(see http://grml.org/config/grml-config.html for more details) but
not only use *one* config.tbz but *all* the available tbz files from
the directory?

So it would become:

| config.d  =>   restore all tbz. files from directory /cdrom/config.d/

That's what you want?

>   The save-config generated configuration, the plain bzip2
>   compressed tar archives is a good thing. But I don't like the fact
>   that all related or unrelated files are all stuffed into this same
>   file. I hope that I can group related files into different .tbz
>   files. It is much more easy to manage than a single file.

You can name your config.tbz like you want (even when generating it
with save-config), see the config=config_foobar.tbz stuff at
http://grml.org/config/grml-config.html

AFAICS all that has to be done for this feature is the config.d
stuff, right?

> - Boot-Options scripts.d, same concept as config.d, for scripts.

> - persistentroot. I don't know how comfortable you are about the
>   union fs now, but I still think that a partition or a loopback
>   device as a persistent root, i.e., not only persistent home, is a
>   good idea.

Persistent root is on our TODO list, see also
http://bts.grml.org/grml/issue121 and
http://bts.grml.org/grml/issue40

Why I delayed the "persistent root via unionfs" stuff is simple:
unionfs is under heavy development (including some dropped features)
and aufs is the current stable solution I prefer. I want to have
things settle down before I write code for it, so let's see whether
unionfs hits vanilla kernel...

regards,
-mika-
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