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tyder

Member

From: Oslo, Norway

Registered: 2016-12-19

Posts: 37  

Needs for better modularization of installs

Running and maintaining any Linux distro should be as independent on filesystems and organization as possible. To me it seems Debian has moved in the opposite direction. An install may work with an overlay file system for years, through several remakings of a read-only, compressed base, but the current Trixie release proves to be seriously challenged with respect to understanding file systems.  Booting and kernel/initramfs administration is much affected.
This influences a lot of functionality, and is typically something that should be easy to unselect when not needed. But they don't want to let you escape in any easy way.
So, I encounter crashes in post-install scripts, often based on this error condition:

/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of `overlay'

Patching them with 'exit 0' kind of breakpoints allows me to get my job done, and this has no relevance for my daily use whatsoever.
But it shouldn't be like that.
Developers of the 'Universal operating system' basic components should follow the most basic Unix principle: Do one thing, and do it well.
In this case, it is about providing a solution for booting and kernel updating. That is necessary, but it is not done well. And forcing the  solution to booting is scope creep. That hardware/firmware is an erratically moving target makes the approach all the worse.
Thus, the current setup that is forced upon us IMO breaks both the basic One Thing-principle, and the requirement to do it well. 

I might have been more positive if the solution had proven to be strictly necessary to get Debian-based systems up&running. But it isn't. Me writing this is a simple counterexample. And one counterexample is enough.

This should be modularized, and instead of discussing this over and over with the upstream developers, we should try to produce a proof of concept.
I don't think we have to channel Erich Boleyn, but it might help ;-)

Last edited by tyder (Today 16:40:33)