[oi-dev] Updating Hipster and GUI log-in breakage with mounted ZFS datasets

[Nikola M]

There is updating Hipster and GUI log-in breakage with mounted ZFS datasets.

Updating Hipster is broken for me since before last 2014.1 update. 
(Updating from August 2014.1 Hipster)
I have /opt in separate dataset and it worked fine before, but when 
updating to last 2014.1 (20141010) with pkg update -v ,  gdm and many 
services do not start and X with it.
Seems like some packages during update, insist in putting files inside 
/opt exclusively on system dataset and it breaks booting rest of the OS 
right.
It reports that /opt is non-empty and insists on it even if it is empty, 
untill also dirs made for mounting sub-datasets are removed. After 
booting with datasets and subdatasets mounted in /opt it sort of works 
(boot to gdm) but it is unable to do so after regular update - that is a 
bug.

I tried emptying /opt and then mounting dataset to /opt (and child 
datasets under /opt) and 20141010 booted and I was able to log in with 
one administrator account through gdm, but logging with another account 
(one that I regularly used in August 2014 Hipster) completely locks 
machine (X, VTs, everything)..
This kind of behavior (not able to log in as one user or locking system 
on logging in) is what I experienced also one time before in Hipster 
(Begining of 2014 I think) and I ended up re-making new account and 
copying only needed data to it .

My suspicion goes to the fact that at my setup, both /opt and /home/user 
datasets have child datasets under it (snapshotting /opt and separate 
snapshots for application data directories) and that is what I suspect 
breaks both updating Hipster and locking system on logging in.

Behavior with broken update (and gdm not starting and other services, 
complaining that /opt is non-empty) is same with /hipster-2015 (I used 
nwamadm from command line (ouch!) and pkg update to update)

Conclusion is that people that are regularly updating Hipster to 
ever-updating rolling releases and using separate datasets and 
sub-datasets end up not being able to start system services, gdm nor X 
and end up in CLI-only OI , not able to test new X.

I suggest updating Hipster be fixed inside 2014.1 publisher first , to 
ensure people having Hipster can update to it right, so they can move to 
hipster-2015.
If not they currently end up with largely unusable system (without 
educated interventions), not able to follow Hipster updates anymore.  
(And that breaks Hipster ever updating idea)