headch at gmail
Jul 19, 2012, 2:01 PM
Post #78 of 80
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On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 07:05:39 -0400
Rich Freeman <rich0 [at] gentoo> wrote:
> As others have mentioned, coreutils doesn't impact the initramfs much
> anyway, though other tools like mdadm/lvm/etc are more likely to.
>
> I think the more practical issue is that it isn't straightforward to
> do in an automated way. I suppose we could keep an always-up-to-date
> kernel and initramfs SOMEWHERE, but that won't necessarily be where
> the user boots it from. Also, we need flexibility as users tend to
> tweak these things - dracut has lots of options for how the initramfs
> is built, users might use any of several initramfs implementations,
> and the kernel config is frequently tweaked, and doesn't always work
> if you just do a make oldconfig. Usually the way other distros make
> all of this work is by making everything generic and not support
> configurability.
>
> Rich
>
For me, the issue isn't so much that it's *hard* to rebuild an
initramfs as that it's not obvious *when* to do so. For the kernel,
this is a trivial problem: when sys-kernel/gentoo-sources bumps,
rebuild the kernel. For an initramfs, when do I rebuild? When there's a
new, what? Coreutils? Mdadm? LVM? Glibc? Busybox? Something-firmware?
What about any less-obvious libraries they might link to, like zlib or
something? All of those things are presumably in my initramfs, but
there's no canonical list I'm aware of that tells me "if one of the
packages in this list updates, you must rebuild your initramfs if you
wish to take advantage of the upgrade".
Chris
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