[Morphix-bugs] [ morphix-Bugs-1872778 ] isomorph "--add boot" command option now fails

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Bugs item #1872778, was opened at 2008-01-16 14:12
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by asmithmb
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Category: None
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 1
Private: No
Submitted By: Andrew Smith (asmithmb)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: isomorph "--add boot" command option now fails

Initial Comment:
Hi guys,

Thanks for making a very good tool, and especially for your continuing work in updating and improving it.

However, sometime between about October and the end of last year the --add boot command for isomorph started to fail. I have been following your progress in tracking the changes in the Linux kernel, because I needed a kernel that would both utilise SATA drives and allow read/write access to NTFS disks. The recent autobuilds around the 2.6.23 kernel do these jobs well.

Very good, but I also need to amend the boot parameters, basically to cope automatically with en-GB keyboards and associated changes. The bundle of morphix tools available until October/November (about when experiments with 2.6.21 kernels started) did this well. Today though the isomorph command fails with an error, "sed -e expression#1, char 58: Unknown option to 's'". I suspect that this is a transcription typo when updating the scripts, because the isomorph --del boot command continues to work without any error.

Over to you, and thanks again.

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>Comment By: Andrew Smith (asmithmb)
Date: 2008-01-16 22:00

Message:
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Originator: YES

After submitting the above I have had time to continue investigation, and
have found a basic cause and a workaround for me. It is now clear that the
difficulty is not really a "bug" and my assignment of a start time was
wrong. I have now therefore taken the priority right down to the lowest
level.

The problem is that a forward slash "/" character in any of the added boot
parameters is passed through to sed by the perl interpreter and then
prevents the proper operation of sed, causing the error noted above. This
failure is important because it stops any of the files needed in boot/grub
on the CD from being copied into place. Result - an unbootable CD.

These slash characters are not used in many kernel parameters except in
one form of the tz parameter controlling the time zone of the OS clock eg
tz=Europe/London. This was what I needed to set, but fortunately the tz=GMT
parameter is equivalent. So my workaround is to substitute the second for
the first form. I am not sure that all time zones have alternative forms,
so other people may not be so fortunate.

The possibility of a failure to boot should, I suggest, be indicated by a
warning that these characters should not be used in parameters, in the
documentation/manual page for isomorph. It is also possible that a change
to single quotes for the string of parameters might also stop the error,
but I have not checked this. The manual page does show double quotes in the
example.

Thanks,
Andrew Smith

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