FS#39659 - [mkinitcpio] Fall back on gzip in case of missing compression program

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Lars Gustäbel (gustaebel) - Friday, 28 March 2014, 08:27 GMT
Last edited by Dave Reisner (falconindy) - Saturday, 05 April 2014, 18:00 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Arch Projects
Status Closed
Assigned To Thomas Bächler (brain0)
Dave Reisner (falconindy)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:

I propose that mkinitcpio falls back on gzip if the user-specified compression program is not installed instead of terminating with an error. Yesterday, I rendered my system unbootable when I removed the lz4 package (because it made problems I didn't care about) but I had forgotten that it was still used in my mkinitcpio.conf. Afterwards, I updated the kernel together with a lot of other packages so the error of mkinitcpio not finding lz4 went by unnoticed in a stream of pacman output.

Wouldn't it be better if in order to limit potential damage mkinitcpio used a failsafe compression method the user did not choose instead of creating an unbootable system?
This task depends upon

Closed by  Dave Reisner (falconindy)
Saturday, 05 April 2014, 18:00 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  https://projects.archlinux.org/mkinitcpi o.git/commit/?id=cfae62080565cc510083490 6a5e9994e094335f4
Comment by Dave Reisner (falconindy) - Sunday, 30 March 2014, 14:24 GMT
I'd rather not make potentially faulty assumptions for a fallback mechanism. What if the kernel doesn't support gzip compressed initramfs images? Falling back on no compression at all seems more sane.

Perhaps something like: http://code.falconindy.com/cgit/mkinitcpio.git/commit/?id=cfae620805

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