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.
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).
