[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#482273: initscripts: race condition between checkfs.sh and USB disk discovery

[Andrew]

I don't know why this has not happened before but I'm running a recent 
Squeeze system and this race condition manifests itself when the checkfs 
script fails, leaving /var/log/fsck/checkfs with cryptiv messages like:

"fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16.2"  "fsck.ext3: no such file or directory"

My boot fails, and my USB disks are not mounted.  Which kinda sucks 
because /usr is a USB SSD.

It took me a while to figure out that "fsck" (2.16.2) was actually 
finding "fsck.ext3", it was "fsck.ext3" that could not find my USB disk 
because it had not been fully blessed by what ever glacial process we're 
now using for this purpose.

I fixed the problem by putting a "sleep 20" into "checkfs.sh".  It 
sucks.  But what else can I do?  I'd rip out hald if I could but instead 
of helping here, it's just another impediment.

It seems that there have been a boatload of swell updates that have made 
upgrading to Squeeze exceptionally painful, and this is just another 
one.  Like evdev leaving my system with inert as a brick since X won't 
take the keyboard and X won't let anyone else take it, so I have to 
power cycle the machine, and hope my disks are recoverable.  Great move 
forward.

I notice from the lack of Debian responses in 7 months, no one seems to 
care.  Whatever.  So much for "no bug too deep," instead it's "lets make 
Firefox lamer by calling it Iceweasel - but  the binary is still 
firefox-bin" or "let's break cdrecord by replacing it with 'wodim' which 
was abandoned years ago".  Nice work.