Message-ID: <4420F93C.1050705@garzik.org>
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 02:14:04 -0500
From: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
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To: Michael Neuling <mikey@neuling.org>
CC: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, klibc@zytor.com,
       Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>, hpa@zytor.com, miltonm@bga.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] initramfs: CPIO unpacking fix
References: <20060216183745.50cc2bf6.mikey@neuling.org>	<20060217160621.99b0ffd4.mikey@neuling.org> <20060322061220.8414067A70@ozlabs.org>
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Michael Neuling wrote:
> Unlink files, symlinks, FIFOs, devices etc. (except directories) before
> writing them when extracting CPIOs.  This stops weird behaviour like:
>  1) writing through symlinks created in earlier CPIOs. eg foo->bar in
>     the first CPIO.  Having foo as a non-link in a subsequent CPIO,
>     results in bar being written and foo remaining as a symlink.  
>  2) if the first version of file foo is larger than foo in a
>     subsequent CPIO, we end up with a mix of the two.  ie. neither
>     the first or second version of /foo.
>  3) special files like devices, fifo etc. can't be overwritten in
>     subsequent CPIOS.
> 
> With this, the kernel will more closely replicate
>   for i in *.cpio; do cpio --extract --unconditional < $i ; done
> 
> This is a change but it's regarded as fixing broken functionality.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Michael Neuling <mikey@neuling.org>

For the kernel, I would regard that as needless code...  Coding for a 
chain of CPIO archives overwriting each other seems like overengineering.

	Jeff


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