Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: converting /etc/mtab to a symlink

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
> And the magic trick is to keep "system mounts" like /run out of
> /etc/mtab (willful desynchronization) so that umount -a doesn't nuke
> them by accident.
>
> ... why else would you keep such data in two non-synchronized locations?! :D
>

Sounds interesting and all, but I don't think this really should be
driving our system design (the desire to have a command that is
supposed to unmount everything not actually unmount everything).  It
wouldn't take more than a few lines of bash to just write a script to
unmount the stuff you're interested in - I routinely toss in my
chroots a script to mount/unmount stuff (tmpfs, bind-mounts, proc/sys,
etc).

There could very well be other issues with changing mtab to a symlink
though, so continue to speak up if there are other things that could
go wrong.

Rich