Bugzilla Bug 119078

On my Debian host, I can dial in during bootup to mgetty and maintain the
system if it isn't booting correctly.
On Gentoo hosts, mgetty gets installed to /usr, which is not (always) available
during boot, so this doesn't work.

It would be great if you could install mgetty to / instead (like Debian does).

While I do agree /sbin and /bin could host mgetty's executables, I find this
locations less suitable locations as /usr/bin & /usr/sbin.
The way I see it, /bin and /sbin should contain really important executables,
like those kind of programs that repair broken filesystems, shell command
interpreters, basic tools used in shell scripts like sed & awk, etc. I doubt
mgetty anyone will qualify mgetty as important for the system's health.
Also, /lib is definitely not a good parent for mgetty+sendfax directory.

Do you keep your /usr on a NFS partition? Why is your /usr unavailable during
boot time?

> The way I see it, /bin and /sbin should contain really important 
> executables, like those kind of programs that repair broken filesystems, 
> shell command interpreters, basic tools used in shell scripts like sed & awk, etc.
For some of my hosts, mgetty is such a critical executable, because without 
it I cannot reach them if bootup fails anywhere before network setup (no or 
difficult physical access).

I don't need sendfax and all that cruft in /, only the bare minimum to get a 
dial-in line so I can login during bootup.

If you don't want to do it generally, please at least add a USE flag for it.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/

if /usr is on your /-partition, it makes no difference. If not, then the
question is: where is your /usr partition? You can copy the mgetty binary to
/sbin after the emerge, for your special setup.

nonetheless, can you post the debian-layout of the 'mgetty'-package?

Let me get this straight. You wanna us to install the mgetty executable in
/sbin/mgetty and leave the other files as is?

reopen bug - time to fix it, along with bug 155670.

reopen bug - time to fix it, along with bug 155670.

Now hopefully I manage to reopen it (sorry for the spam).

Fixed in 1.1.35-r2.
mgetty is installed in /sbin, with the additional symlink /usr/sbin/mgetty
(needed for hylafax).