Re: bin/59990: /etc/security: first run mails megabytes of output

["Valery Ushakov via gnats" <gnats-admin%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/59990; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: bin/59990: /etc/security: first run mails megabytes of output
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:49:11 +0300

 On Sun, Feb 15, 2026 at 14:34:21 +0000, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
 
 > And we'd have to model the listing of devices and suid/sgid files via
 > mtree(8) -- and find some way to model the disklabels and MBRs too
 > (and GPTs if we did that).
 
 It doesn't have to be perfect.  Just pre-creating the baseline
 "backups" for the /etc and /root dot-files is already an
 improvement... and saves time on the first boot for slower machines
 (spare a thought for a diskless Jornada with NFS root over 10MB PCMCIA
 card, or slower SD cards in arm gizmos).
 
 For anything else, do we really need to send the initial diff against
 /dev/null?  New etc files are "interesting".  The initial list of
 devices probably not so much.  Just don't emit the diff that is
 against non-existing baseline?
 
 
 > So perhaps a simpler approach -- and what I'm trying right now for the
 > present purpose -- is an rc script that just does:
 > 
 > 	# Make sure /etc/security has saved a backup of everything.
 > 	if ! [ -s /var/backups/etc/master.passwd.current ]; then
 > 		/etc/security >/dev/null
 > 	fi
 > 
 > (master.passwd is the one file that is unconditionally always backed
 > up, hard-coded in /etc/security.)
 
 I guess that's not _too_ bad, as long as it doesn't take a week on
 sun2... :) Pre-creating the "backups" that we can precreate will
 probably speed it up too.
 
 
 -uwe