Comment 117 for bug 525154

On 11-07-18 04:27 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> This appears to be bug #523484.
>
> To the best of my understanding, this describes a feature that is missing

Uhm, not so much "missing" as "broken".

> when using a separate /var (the ureadahead job will run but not do anything
> useful).

It's not even that nice. What it will do is litter the boot with error
messages, which is annoying and distracting at best and a red herring
when there are other upstart/mountall bugs, at worst.

A first time admin of a system with a separate /var sees these errors on
boot, and even if he is lucky enough that boot succeeds, is still
concerned about the errors (if he is any good) and wastes time chasing
them down only to find that they are a bug that exists and has not and
will not be fixed. Not very classy.

> This is certainly a bug, but not something that we are likely to
> backport to lucid even when a fix becomes available.

So instead you let the above situation continue on ad infinitum,
confusing new users?

> I think you would be
> hard pressed to convince any of the Ubuntu developers that it has a major
> impact on the usability of Ubuntu that systems with a separate /var don't
> get the boot speed enhancement from ureadahead!

It's not even the boot speed enhancement that is the issue. It's the
emission of spurious errors that any good admin will have to waste time
chasing down.

> Also, you say that people have posted solutions; I've reviewed the bug log
> and there are no solutions to the bug there. Most of the proposals would
> work *only* on systems with detached /var, so are not suitable for
> inclusion in the distribution;

Surely they are a good start though, with some conditional code needing
added to test for that separate /var case.

> So I'm afraid I regard this bug's current prioritization as "medium" to be
> correct, sorry. Patches welcome, but I think it's unlikely that this is
> going to be worked on soon otherwise.

Exactly my point and the point of mine (and others') frustration. You
guys let a bug get out into the wild by not testing a use-case that is
and/or should be very common in the server use space and now that it's
out there, you are just letting it ride.