Re: [gentoo-dev] Arbitrary breakage: sys-fs/cryptsetup

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 07:48 -0600, schism@subverted.org wrote:
> Normally I don't take to the skies with this sort of thing, but this was
> ridiculous.  In what I am sure was a well-intentioned change, cryptsetup
> recently silently lost its default USE=static status.  For one of the
> many people actually using cryptsetup in an initrd, this came as a
> lovely surprise this morning as I found my new kernel/initrd completely
> unbootable.
> 
> To compound matters, udev-181's incompatibility with my old kernel (no
> DEVTMPFS, separate /usr), and my primary system was completely
> unbootable.
> 
> Please - if you're going to significantly change functionality that
> (whether correct or not) people have come to depend on, have the decency
> to at least publish a news article on it.  I may find 'eselect news'
> annoying, but I at least read it.  Before we get to bikeshedding, I'm
> well aware there were multiple ways to have prevented this, but none of
> them were in place [1].  What was in place was default behavior that had
> been there for a very long time.
> 
> 
> [1] For one, genkernel should bomb out if it can't comply with a
> command-line arg instead of just putting non-alert text up.

There is already a bug open about this issue:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409277

However, I must still thank you for alerting the list about it; you
saved lots of peoples' systems (probably including mine, if I had not
read this message) from being rendered unbootable.

-Alexandre Rostovtsev.