Bootup and package managment (and a small status report)

[Alfred M\. Szmidt]

Hi,

I'm back in business and working on a new snapshot of GNU that will
use unionfs for package managment.  But there is a small problem that
I have not been able to solve (atleast not in a way that is
practical).

By default, all packages that belong to the system live in /packages,
and then /stow contains symbolic links to /packages/PACKAGE, from
which unionfs builds /bin, /sbin, ..., etc.

The problem is that when one boots GNU (all the way from grub), one
needs /boot/gnumach, /hurd/ext2fs.static, /hurd/exec, /lib/ld.so.1,
etc.  These files are not avaiable[0] since unionfs hasn't been
started, and it in turn needs the same things.

The nicest solution so far that I can come up with is starting unionfs
from grub by doing something like:

 module /lib/ld.so.1 /hurd/unionfs ....

But this requires that one needs to specify the location for
/lib/ld.so.1, /hurd/unionfs, and all other things that one specifies
in grub already to boot GNU.  That is, one would have to replace
/lib/ld.so.1 with /packages/glibc-1.2.3/lib/ld.so.1, and when you
update glibc, you'd have to update grub's menu.lst file.  And this is
a major annoyance IMHO.

One could also store ld.so.1, unionfs, and all other core bits in
/init (or similar), and just use those filenames.  But then when
upgrading glibc/hurd/gnumach one must upgrade /init in some manner
that doesn't involve unionfs, maybe copying the currently installed
versions there on shutdown.

Does anyone see a solution that is better than the above proposals?

[0]: In the usual location that is, one can find them in /packages or
where ever the user installed the files.  But many things depend that
they can be found in a standard place, like the exec translator being
found in /hurd.  It also eases maintaince.