Drake Wyrm wrote:

> I rather have to disagree. *.example files and other
> documentation-related goodies in my /etc directory annoy me, but a
> well-commented config file with some reasonable defaults is a dream to
> work with.

exactly

> A few interesting *.example files under /usr/share/doc would
> be spiffy.

Examples, in  a non-annoying place, are always good.

> I know every once in a while you get complaints from a user who
> inattentively clobbered something vital. Just remember that the ones you
> notice are the screaming minority.

Being the user who "inattentively clobbered something vital", and then 
started this thread, I can say:

1) I'm a newbie at gentoo and udev (as is everyone), but not a Linux 
newbie. I've been hand editing my fstab on various distributions for 
over ten years.

2) If I made this mistake, probably someone else has or will too.

So, perhaps it's useful to know why I made the mistake (by the way, I 
did keep my old fstab around, so it was easy to put back, and the reason 
I got confused was that the system worked fine with the borked fstab, 
except for errors trying to run fschk on boot. It's still a mystery to 
me how the system ran with that fstab!)

Anyway, the reason I got confused was that the fstab that came with the 
udev package had "BOOT", "ROOT", and "SWAP" in it with NO explanation 
that those were placeholders. They looked to me like they might be magic 
names that udev figured out for you. The fact that my system worked 
reinforced this idea. So:

if there were a single, simple comment it that file, I would not have 
made the mistake. Something like:

# This is a template of an example fstab file. Replace "BOOT", "ROOT",
# and "SWAP" with the appropriate drive devices for you system, for
# example: "/dev/hda3" for the third partition of the first IDE drive.

Another thought: Is there a way for portage to tell the difference 
between an install and an upgrade? and if an upgrade, what version is 
being upgraded from? In an upgrade, there is no need install a new 
config file unless the features or syntax of that config file has 
changed. In this case, I can think of no reason that I would ever have 
needed a new fstab after upgrading udev, and a BIG reason to keep the 
old one. It would be nice of portage could figure this out for me and 
not make me figure it out myself. Indeed, if there has been a change in 
features or syntax, I'd love to know what those changes are, in some 
easy to access place.

-Chris

-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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