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Per Glen I am referencing bug #24668 as initial background. 1. The man pages do not state that a umount -a will set /dev/root to ro (documentation issue) If the points below arent fixed the man pages should at least provide something like the following. umount -a will change /dev/root to read-only and mtab cannot be updated. A mount -a can only be executed properly if you first do a mount -n -o remount rw /. Failure to do so may cause some system instablity that may appear to require a re-boot. Following the above procedure of remounting /dev/root will avoid this. Additionally /dev/pts will show erratic behavior such as respawing and locking up VT's on logout. 2. The mount -a command does not undo what umount -a does (consistency issue) 3. The umount -a will not set /root/dev to ro if you have customized partiton setups (eg / /boot or / /home) ( consistency issue). 4. Even the rc.sysinit specifically uses mount -n -o remount ro / instead of umount -a. Based on the source code this is a "feature". However it is not well documented and doesnt work consistently. The inconsistencies should be addressed by this release or future releases.
Fixed the man page. Changing the inconsistencies is up to the base package maintainer, but unless we want to introduce another file (/etc/stuff-remounted-by-umount-a), I don't see how this can be done without breaking other things.
So does that mean you are going to contact the maintainer/developer or do I?