The following reply was made to PR misc/36508; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Johnny C. Lam" <jlam@pkgsrc.org>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: misc/36508: Init scripts to enable mounting from read only filesystems
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:20:46 +0000

 I don't think these scripts will be good in the general case.
 
 Take the case of /var.  It is almost certainly a critical file system
 to mount, and so must really be done either within mountcritlocal or
 as a script that REQUIRES root and is BEFORE mountcritlocal.
 
 I don't think the suggestion to populate /var "only sometimes" makes
 sense.  I understand the difficulty where /var needs to be mounted
 extremely early and one can't rely on the presence of utilities stored
 on /usr, e.g. mtree, chown, chgrp, etc., to help with populating /var.
 
 Why not create a "mountvar" script that REQUIRES root and is BEFORE
 mountcritlocal that has an additional action "create" that creates
 a .tar file on the root filesystem?  Then the "start" action could
 mount the tmpfs filesystem onto /var and then just extract the .tar
 file directly into /var using /bin/pax.  This avoids any problems
 with not having /usr mounted at boot time.
 
 The "mounttmp" script should probably grow the option to just symlink
 /tmp to /var/tmp and avoid needing two separate tmpfs mounts for both
 n /var and /tmp.  the cases where one might want to deal with read-only
 root, e.g. for an embedded device, symlinking /tmp to /var/tmp is
 fairly common.  I would guess the "mounttmp" script would REQUIRE
 mountvar and is BEFORE mountcritlocal.
 
 I do think that these "mountvar" and "mounttmp" scripts should be just
 incorporated directly into the mountcritlocal script.
 
 	Cheers,
 
 	-- Johnny Lam <jlam@pkgsrc.org>