Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 23:29:58 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it> To: stable@freebsd.org Cc: re@freebsd.org Subject: RFC: side effects of fixing loader_conf_files handling Message-ID: <20090118222958.GA32414@onelab2.iet.unipi.it>
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hi,
in some recent commits to HEAD and stable/7 i fixed the handling
of loader_conf_files so that it behaves as always intended and
documented in loader.conf(5):
...
loader_conf_files
Defines additional configuration files to be processed
right after the present file.
Previously, the check for new assignments was incorrect, and it happened
to ignored assignments which did not result in a buffer reallocation
by the Forth interpreter (essentially, any string not longer
than the current one was ignored).
An annoying side effect of the fix is that now people who (mistakenly)
copied /boot/defaults/loader.conf into /boot/loader.conf (and
possibly edit it), now create a loop because their /boot/loader.conf
now contains
loader_conf_files="/boot/device.hints /boot/loader.conf /boot/loader.conf.local"
which is not just a pure assignments.
Never mind the fact nobody ever recommended to copy the file and
then modify the copy, there seem to be several people who do this
(and do the same for /etc/defaults/rc.conf).
I think we should remove the use of loader_conf_files=...
from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, partly to prevent this kind
of bugs, and partly because it is nice to have only "pure assigments"
in this file.
If there are no objections, i will look at how to do it.
Probably this requires putting the initial list of files
somewhere else, probably in /boot/loader.rc after the
include /boot/loader.4th
statement.
Comments ?
cheers
luigi
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