Re: [gentoo-catalyst] LiveCD UNIONFS overlay

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 21:05 +0200, Georg Lippold wrote:
> If in /usr/share/genkernel/generic/initrd.scripts the function parse_opt
> is changed with the corresponding | as delimiter, then one wouldn't have
> to change anything else. It would look like this:
>
> parse_opt() {
>          case "$1" in
>                  *\|*)
>                          local key_name="`echo "$1" | cut -f1 -d\|`"
>                          local key_len=`strlen key_name`
>                          local value_start=$((key_len+2))
>                          echo "$1" | cut -c ${value_start}-
>                  ;;
>          esac
> }
>
>
> What is your opinion on this?

We don't support UnionFS in any way and don't have plans on doing so for
some time.  We also do not want to break compatibility in genkernel
mid-release, as this caused us quite enough headaches between 2005.0 and
2005.1's releases.

To put it simply, the UnionFS support in genkernel is known to be broken
and not working well, which is why we have removed the --unionfs option
from genkernel.  It is so low on our priority list, that we're
definitely saying that we'll get to it "when we have time" and I can
tell you that I, personally, won't have time for months.

Remember that genkernel and catalyst *are* two separate projects, and
genkernel must maintain usability.  We can't use a pipe to delimit
things, as that could be interpreted by the shell.

Currently, all of our limited attention is focused on resolving bugs,
and working towards releasing catalyst 2.0 to the world.  I'd almost
expect a feature freeze on genkernel for some time, as we work to
stabilize the codebase.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux