Re: [PATCH 2/4] Remove stale archivemount support

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

On Fri, 22 Mar 2024 13:27:37 +1100
David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> mbuto has two ways of building the initramfs.  One is the typical approach
> of staging its contents in a temporary directory, then building the
> initramfs with cpio.  The other is to create an empty initramfs, mount
> it with archivemount, and copy things into the mounted archive.
> 
> However, the archivemount approach is broken.  I'm not entirely sure why,
> but it appears not to properly unmount the archive and retrieve the final.
> filled version.  The upshot is that if archivemount is installed, then
> mbuto generates an empty, gzip-compressed initramfs instead of whatever it
> was supposed to.  It looks like this has bitrotted from some earlier
> working version.
> 
> The archivemount approach is not necessary, and honestly a pretty strange
> and roundabout way of building the initramfs.  Remove it.

There were two reasons behind that: first off, I mistakenly assumed
that the kernel could see changes made to the initramfs after boot.

Second, it was actually convenient for developing this tool as I could
just make directories and copies in half-working images. I also had
half a mind about some usage with QEMU rebooting the guest, and the
initramfs would change across reboots without having to call mbuto
again, for bisections or suchlike.

But sure, it turned out to be quite complicated to maintain, and it
looks like it has been broken on Fedora for a while now (probably due
to differences between fakeroot and fakeroot-ng I didn't take into
account), so, with some regrets, I'm fine to drop this now.

-- 
Stefano