Re: [gentoo-dev] Why isn't /root/.bash_profile in the stage tarballs?

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 12:34 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > what catalyst should do is just before cleaning up the stage3 root and
> > > packing it up is run `rsync -a /etc/skel/ /root/`
> >
> > It definitely should not.  One of my primary motivations with catalyst
> > is to ensure that the users get *exactly* what would be provided by the
> > profiles/packages.  We don't add extra files into the stages and likely
> > never will.  Doing something like this in catalyst would create an
> > inconsistency between doing a stage3 install and any previous stage
> > installs.  Yes, we don't support stage1 anymore, but we still support
> > stage1 users once their systems are up and running.  Having them
> > inconsistent only causes one more area where we have to do extra
> > troubleshooting to determine the cause.
>
> not really ... someone installing by hand and someone taking a default setup
> are different things.  we know that someone taking a stage3 has never
> configured anything before and so we can safely put defaults into /root/.  we
> have no idea what people have done when they run emerge themselves.  that is
> why only putting this into catalyst makes sense.

I'll respectfully disagree and say again that I won't add anything like
this to catalyst for the reasons mentioned above.  I see no reason why
we cannot provide sensible defaults in stages lower than three,
especially since I want to see everything in ebuild code.

Also, my plan for this would be add the copying of the .bash* files
from /etc/skel if and only if USE=build *and* the files do not already
exist, done during pkg_preinst/pkg_postinst somewhere.  This will pull
it into the stage1 tarball, making it available to everyone on all
further stages, it keeps it from being done every time someone emerges
bash, it doesn't stomp on existing files, and it doesn't show up in VDB
linked to the bash package.  Is this acceptable?

> > Well, it depends on whether we're interested in getting all of /etc/skel
> > or just the .bash* files.  About the only thing I would see useful as
> > "defaults" is the .bash* stuff and a .ssh directory.  I do agree that
> > everything else should be left up to the user.  If we decided what to
> > include and limited it, it shouldn't be a problem to do it via USE=build
> > at all.
>
> anything that is part of the system /etc/skel/ makes sense (iow, anything that
> is in /etc/skel/ at the end of stage3).  the files from bash and the .ssh dir
> are the only things that go into /etc/skel/ right now for the default system.

OK.  So we now know that only bash/openssh would be really important
here, and the .ssh directory really isn't much of a show-stopper, since
it isn't populated.  I mention this only because we don't install
openssh until stage3, so there's no special USE flags in use at that
time.  If we limited it to bash (and tcsh, etc. for non-Linux) using
USE=build, it would satisfy this request, one which I personally would
like to see done, and still not have to change a single line of code in
catalyst, which also respects my wishes.  It doesn't stomp on user's
files.  All in all, it seems like a safe enough solution to me.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation