Bug#434934: mdadm: should not fail with no arrays or with superblockless arrays

[martin f krafft]

tags 434934 pending
thanks

also sprach Marc Lehmann <debian-reportbug at plan9.de> [2007.07.27.2158 +0200]:
> I have a number of systems with superblockless arrays, or systems with no
> pesistent arrays at all, and its very hard to use the debian mdadm package
> (while its very easy to use mdadm itself), as the dbeian package fails
> when it should not:
> 
>    Assembling MD arrays...failed (no arrays found in config file or
>    automatically).

How does it fail? It prints a notice (not even a warning) and that's
correct. It also exits with 0. You should just turn of AUTOSTART in
/etc/default/mdadm, since that does not work anyway in your case.
I added an FAQ entry.

> nothing failed here in fact: all configured arrays could be assembled
> properly, so this is just a spurious and misleading message.
> 
> especially on systems that have superblockless arrays: these can be
> configured with mdadm, but i have not found a way to configure these with
> mdadm.conf.

Superblockless arrays are a thing of the past, why do you want to
use them?

> It also tries to get itself into every initrd and gives scary messages:
> 
>    W: mdadm: falling back to emergency procedure in initramfs.
> 
> I have no idea what the emergency procedure is (this should be explained
> more clearly)

How about changing the warning to

  letting initramfs assemble auto-detected arrays.

and making it an info message? Anyway, auto-detection requires
superblocks, so you have nothing to worry about.

> In short, it would be nice if mdadm *respected* the config file
> that it is so insistent for users to look at. Or put another way,
> either respect the config file, or don't force the user throught
> he tedious process of creating one when the package that ignroes
> it.

I'll happily accept patches which solve this to your liking and
still prevent hundreds of users with unbootable systems.

> Another option would be tomove those scripts into mdadm-scripts or
> something like that, so that debian offers a mdadm package that,
> well, gives you mdadm and not some debian-only-enforced config
> file that doesn't even offer mdadm's level of functionality.

Yours is a corner case. Please submit patches which split the
package into mdadm and auto-mdadm. I won't do it as I see no reason
for that. Debian's mdadm integration works for most cases out of the
box. This is what Debian is: it makes things easier for the
administrator. If you don't like what it does, well tell it (hint:
AUTOSTART).

With the AUTOSTART reference and the de-escalation in place, the
pending 2.6.3-1 upload shall close this.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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