Bug 1148

@jcl: you don't need to add yourself in CC in bug reports you open, because you'll get emails of changes in the report anyway.

 I installed mageia beta2 on a new machine using LIVE method. At the first reboot, I rebooted in safe mode instead of normal mode. Then I edited the file /usr/sbin/finish-install and I modified the line 173:

I replaced :

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
run_program::run(qq(grep -rl $old_home $new_home/.??* | while read f; do perl -pi -e 's,$old_home,$new_home,g' "\$f"; done));

with

#run_program::run(qq(grep -rl $old_home $new_home/.??* | while read f; do perl -pi -e 's,$old_home,$new_home,g' "\$f"; done));
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 which, actually, simply deactivate this line.

 Then I rebooted in normal mode and installation has completed very quickly and flawlessly without running this "grep" command inside the /usr/sbin/finish-install script. 

 So the question is : Do we still have any good reasons to keep this "grep" command in that script ?
 
PS : when I rebooted in normal mode I choosed a username which was already existing on the /home file system, which means that if the grep command would have been present in the finish-install script, the completion of the installation would have taken ages or never finished....

 I am wondering if I am the only guy who encountered that bug or what ? So far I did not get any answer. Is it postponed for the next release ?

My guess is that most people do not share /home, so the problem doesn't
show up.

/home should not be shared across versions/distributions, as the
formats used in the configuration files will vary.  (I learned that
the hard way!)

I give each distro it's own /home, but replace directories such as
~/Documents with a symlink to a directory within a separately mounted
"data" filesystem, so that data can be shared.  Sharing config files
is not a good idea.

Some very specific "configuration" files can be shared, when you know
the formats are the same, but you have to handle that case by case.

While I have signed on as a member of the QA team, I'm just a regular user.
My recommendation is to avoid sharing /home.  It will definitely cause
problems in the future, if you do share it.

In my opinion, jcl darkc, this bug should be closed as invalid, as it is
being caused by actions that should not be taken.

CC: (none) => davidwhodgins

Hi david,

 I do not agree with your opinion. People may want to use a shared /home directory for every distributions or OS upgrade.

If we follow your recommandation, where do you specify users's home ?

Imagine that at the first installation, you specified the home location for the user "jcl" here :

==> /home/jcl

so what do you do for the next upgrade/install ?
*) /home2/jcl ? (so you create a new partition or you create a symlink ?)
*) /home/jcl2   (so you change the username name ?)

So it means a user intervention to do this and some average linux administration skill, which is not the case for most of the people. To not have a shared
home directory looks like a regression and does not look like a really professional operating system...

The problem here, is that there is a **bad implementation** in the script /usr/sbin/finish-install, that I mentionned in my bug report (#1148), which needs to be fixed.

 It would be far better to re-think that script which will let the user every possibilities for her/his home directory (create a new one or use shared home).

If Mageia team think you are right, and I will be disapointed, it will be necessary to put some information about this issue in the ERRATA document...

This will be fixed in next drakxtools release (using grep -D skip)

Status: NEW => ASSIGNED

Good evening,
 
Well, good point for you Olivier,  "grep -D skip" will fix the bug which hang the first boot process if there is a FIFO file in the user's home.

But I am still questionning of the utility of this grep command which can take a very long time to complete if the user's home is big (thousand of files) ? Could you give me some explanations about the purpose of this grep command, is it really necessary ?

 According to my experience, every time I install a new mandriva/mageia distribution on my system (with a shared user's home directory), I have to kill this "grep" command (which hang in my case bc of the fifo) and afterward my system still works perfectly. So it looks like this "grep" call is useless... Could we not simply remove it ?

 Anyway thanks for giving me some hope, I don't feel lonely anymore :)

After live install, the user is asked to choose a user name, but it is not actually creating a new user, it is just renaming the "live" user, and keeping the home from live system (using usermod), so that documents and settings creating during live session are not lost.

This grep | sed command is used to modify the config files so that the settings reflect the new home path (instead of /home/live)

We could skip all this if the target home already exists.
But where to put the files and settings creating during live session?

The hang is fixed in drakxtools-13.55-1.mga1

Status: ASSIGNED => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => FIXED

(In reply to comment #8)
> After live install, the user is asked to choose a user name, but it is not
> actually creating a new user, it is just renaming the "live" user, and keeping
> the home from live system (using usermod), so that documents and settings
> creating during live session are not lost.
> 
> This grep | sed command is used to modify the config files so that the settings
> reflect the new home path (instead of /home/live)
> 
> We could skip all this if the target home already exists.
> But where to put the files and settings creating during live session?

 At the first reboot, if the user choose to use his old (or previous) user's home, then ** YES ** skip the recursive grep command which is non sense in this case. And all settings created during the live session can be lost because the user WANTS his old session back, so no big deal !

 I looked carefully at the command grep used from /usr/sbin/finish-install script. Here it is:

grep -D skip -rl $old_home $new_home/.??* | while read f; do perl -pi -e 's,$old_home,$new_home,g' "\$f"; done

 Let'say I choosed "jcl" username (which is already exist, for my case on my disk, and which is /home/jcl from the previous install), then :

variable $new_home="/home/jcl"
variable $old_home="/home/live" (which comes from the live session)

then the real command is :

grep -D skip -rl /home/live /home/jcl/.??*   | while read f; do perl -pi -e 's,/home/live,/home/jcl,g' $f;done

which can be run directly, by everybody, from a terminal.

So, this command find recursively ALL the hidden files starting from /home/jcl like:
.login
.config/gtk-2.0/*
.kde4/*
/home/jcl/.cache/chromium/Default/Cache/*  !!!!!!!!!
.mozilla/firefox/2zzh7jne.default/Cache/ * !!!!!!!!!
..
..
etc

 then from all these files try to find if the string "/home/live" exist and if it exists change all string "/home/live" by "/home/jcl" !!! 

This is 1) non sense and useless from an existing user's home, and 2) it can take a very long time to complete. So please, I would advice to modify the script to skip this command in case if user's home already exist. And in such case, live settings can be lost with no dammage.

  Thanks in advance.

 
 Hi, I don't think that this bug is resolved see my last post https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1148#c10

Status: RESOLVED => REOPENED
Resolution: FIXED => (none)

This bug is still valid I think ?

CC: (none) => thierry.vignaud
Source RPM: drakx-finish-install => drakxtools

I think there are several issues there:

- not checking if a user has actually been created
   any::ask_user_and_root(..)  OR RETURN

- assuming the renamed user (aka the newly created/asked one)
  is the first one whereas it will actually be the last

So we should:
- either do nothing if no user has actually been created
- use the last user as the renamed one
- or use some better heuristic (such as empty or nearly empty homedir)

Created attachment 891 [details]
(untested) example of better heuristik

Not critical though

Status: REOPENED => ASSIGNED
Severity: critical => normal

*** Bug 1599 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

CC: (none) => pmithrandir

Thanks for the duplicate entry, I didn't found this issue.

For me it's critical because you can arrive at a point where your system freeze during installation, just by using the same username.(very common)

A guess, is it possible to reduce the number of the files in the grep ? All jpg, mp4, mp3, avi files are examined in your command I think... and it's definitly not usefull to do a grep on such files. 

A question, do you replace the files from the home directory(/home/jcl) by the files from /home/live directory during installation ? It would make a lot of sence to reset the environment and to have all users with the same initial config. I don't say to remove files, but to copy and replace during the installation process. 
It would be easier for the developper to works on people with the same env, and a way for the user to reset his config, without loosing all the home partition.
(It was my first idea when I reinstall my mageia, reset my broken KDE4 plasmoid config easily, an installation process takes 20-25 minutes when looking for a bug takes hours...)

Hi,

This bug was filed against cauldron, but we do not have cauldron at the moment.

Please report whether this bug is still valid for Mageia 2.

Thanks :)

Cheers,
marja

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

*** Bug 9098 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

CC: (none) => joao.m.santos.silva

@all: still valid to be kept or closed as old? thanks