A bug in /etc/rc.d/functions; and the release policy

Question

This is a small issue, but how it relates to Arch's release policy is important.
I have CONSOLE="ter-120b" in my rc.conf, and I got following screen on startup. The message about console font is overwritten by the next message. Additionally, the right side is "[BUSY]".
http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy24 … ot/bad.png
It turned out to be a bug in the set_consolefont, in /etc/rc.d/functions:
if (($? != 0)); then
stat_fail
elif [[ $CONSOLEMAP ]]; then
cat <<"EOF" >>/etc/profile.d/locale.sh
if [ "$CONSOLE" = "" -a "$TERM" = "linux" -a -t 1 ]; then printf "\033(K"; fi
EOF
stat_done
fi
stat_done is not called on the implicit "else" branch. The fix is easy:
if (($? != 0)); then
stat_fail
else
if [[ $CONSOLEMAP ]]; then
cat <<"EOF" >>/etc/profile.d/locale.sh
if [ "$CONSOLE" = "" -a "$TERM" = "linux" -a -t 1 ]; then printf "\033(K"; fi
EOF
fi
stat_done
fi
The effect is shown here.
http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy24 … t/good.png
However, that made me think about Arch's release policy. The latest release is 2010.5, 10 months ago. That usually doesn't matter that much, as Arch is a rolling release distro, and the CD image is really light. However, now and then we may spot bugs in scripts like /etc/rc.d/functions, which come with the CD and remain untouched by pacman. Will it be better if we follow Gentoo's approach, generating installation media every few days, putting latest software (and more importantly for Arch) and fixed scripts in it?
PS. I'd love to remove some black area in the screenshots, but I can't figure out how to do it with GIMP. Help on this is also appreciated.
Last edited by jasonwryan (2011-03-09 06:44:53)

Answer 1

tomk wrote:
xiaq wrote:now and then we may spot bugs in scripts like /etc/rc.d/functions, which come with the CD and remain untouched by pacman.
You are mistaken. /etc/rc.d/functions is provided by the initscripts package, which has been updated four times since the 2010.05 release. The current version is 2011.02.1.
I suggest you submit the bug and your patch in the normal way, so that it is handled correctly.
All right, so I'm firing a bug report and send in my patch there. I have also found that /etc/rc.d/functions has some style problems. It uses a mix of space and tab for indentation, and the misleading modeline option "ts=2" (ts means "tabstop") makes the code look terrible. I have tried several values, and ts=8 turned out fine(most likely the author use this setting and don't use vim). The code is still inconsistent in style, though. So I'm going to clean up the style too. Is that okay as long as I don't break something?