From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751735AbaCUWzV (ORCPT ); Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:55:21 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:48958 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750789AbaCUWzT (ORCPT ); Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:55:19 -0400 Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:55:17 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Alexander Holler Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] initramfs: print error and shell out for unsupported content Message-Id: <20140321155517.51af1b28fe32656fb7506f97@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <532CC215.1000107@ahsoftware.de> References: <1395352845-7435-1-git-send-email-holler@ahsoftware.de> <20140321140305.a3679620aa25132a3b75a404@linux-foundation.org> <532CC215.1000107@ahsoftware.de> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.2.0beta5 (GTK+ 2.24.10; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 21 Mar 2014 23:49:57 +0100 Alexander Holler wrote: > Am 21.03.2014 22:03, schrieb Andrew Morton: > > On Thu, 20 Mar 2014 23:00:45 +0100 Alexander Holler wrote: > > > >> The initramfs generation is broken for file and directory names which contain > >> colons or spaces. Print an error and don't try to continue. > > > It would be better to fix the it-doesnt-work-with-all-filenames bug. > > Any details on that? > > IMHO not worth the time. The whole process which is curently used is > extremly fragile. > > E.g it's almost guaranteed to fail trying to include arbitrary filenames > as dependencies in a Makefile. Besides the one problem I've discoverd > with colons, there could be much more things happen, e.g. with filenames > which do include other special Makefile characters you all would have to > escape correctly. > > And the problem with spaces isn't as easy to fix as it first does look > like. I think it might be easier to write the whole stuff new instead of > trying to escape the spaces in various ways needed to end up correctly > in the cpio (it first goes through shell code and is then feeded as some > list to a C program). > > And I think that just isn't worth the time. Using find | cpio works just > fine to generate a cpio archive and usually an initramfs just contains > some megabytes. So it isn't a problem at all to rebuild the complete > cpio archive with every call of make, it doesn't need much more than > about a second or similiar on almost any machine. > > And for the records, I indeed had a deeper look, trying to fix it. But, > as said, quickly realized that it will need too much effort and doesn't > make sense, if it will be doable correctly at all. > huh, OK. Should we check for \t and \n as well?