Hello, If lilo uses boot password with mandatory policy and password is set empty in the config file (for security reasons in order not to save plain text password): password="" mandatory then on sys-boot/lilo package update on install phase it requires password to be entered. No message is shown on the console, though if one enters password twice, install continues. The problem is that such behaviour turns lilo into an interactive ebuild without proper emerge notice about interactive packages. This leads to quite a nasty issue when world update is left unattended (it may take days to complete on some mine setups) and just stops indefinitely until manual intervention. This happens with all lilo versions (including the latest 24.0). Suggested solutions: 1) Parse /etc/lilo.conf and mark package as interactive. 2) If interactive condition is detected, do not update boot sector automatically and issue ewarn/eerror to request manual update from the user. (This can be done after all packages are installed.)
Created attachment 367202 [details] emerge --info
Ping. Problem is still here with 24.0-r1.
It is an incredibly unusual config, so I welcome a patch to address it.
Created attachment 391020 [details, diff] lilo-24.0-r1.ebuild.patch And patch follows :) What it does: it checks for empty password set it lilo.conf and omits dolilo run if this condition is met. Check for mandatory option is not needed, since this is default for lilo. Patch is not perfect, because when password is empty it always asks user to run lilo -p manually, while not all dolilo runs will require it. I found two conditions when lilo will go interactive: 1) lilo.conf was updated, but lilo -p was not run; this is easy to check by comparing lilo.conf and lilo.conf.shs modification times. 2) lilo binary was updated itself. This is hard to check reliably, since update may or may not happen during both package update and reinstall. Maybe there are more, I do not claim that conditions above form full set of possible reasons for lilo going interactive. That's why in order to be on a safe side I enabled warning and disabled dolilo run for each setup where empty password is set in lilo.conf.
+*lilo-24.1 (22 Jan 2015) + + 22 Jan 2015; Tony Vroon <chainsaw@gentoo.org> +lilo-24.1.ebuild, + +files/lilo-24.1-novga.patch: + Avoid interactive password configurations, based on a report and initial + patch by Andrew Savchenko in bug #497288. New upstream release, closes bug + #536942 by Joshua Kinard.