Comment 37 for bug 525154

On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 15:28 +0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> As I wrote in comment #15, we don't have a viable workaround yet that
> doesn't inroduce other hangs / failures in other scenarios.

I guess the question then is whether any effort is being spent towards
such a solution.

> A "fix"
> that will break all ability to further upgrade the system is worse than
> the status quo, because it means security fixes can't be applied.

Fair enough. But leaving systems unbootable for a portion of the users
surely cannot be an acceptable solution either, yes?

> Until someone is able to identify a solution that doesn't have this
> disadvantage, there's nothing that can be done here.

Who would this "someone" be? It's sounding an awful lot like nobody is
actually working on the real root cause (and solution) of this issue and
everyone is just hoping that "somebody else" will come up with a
solution.

> "stable" does not mean "usable for all proposed uses".

So having a /var on a separate filesystem is "fringe" enough that those
users should not be able to experience a stable system? /var on it's
own filesystem is the only "responsible" way to manage a system. You
can glom any other crap you want onto / but leaving /var on / to grow
until it fills up / is simply irresponsible for any use-case except
single-user machines. Is this "single-user" use case all that Ubuntu is
interested in satisfying? Multi-user/server (i.e. corporate users)
installations are not a useful user-base for Canonical?