Autofs problem while using new nfs-utils package

I just emerged the latest gentoo release of the nfs-utils package, nfs-utils-1.1.0-r1.ebuild. I found that the autofs code did not work for my diskless computers that have a readonly /etc directory with a /etc/mtab symbolically linked to /proc/mounts. This was because the creation of the mtab lock file /etc/mtab~nnnn failed. I noticed that in the update_mtab() function, a check was put in to acertain whether this situation existed and silently carried on whereas the add_mtab() function did not perform the check and consequently failed. My simple minded fix was to add the the same check to add_mtab() as can be seen in the context diff below. Automounting worked
fine after the fix was applied. Hopefully some fix will make its way into
the authoratative release so that I do not have to patch my code locally.

Thanks,

Michael Rayment

*** utils/mount/mount.c.sav Sat Oct 6 01:52:21 2007
--- utils/mount/mount.c Sat Oct 6 01:55:25 2007
***************
*** 181,188 ****
--- 181,191 ----

                update_mtab(ment.mnt_dir, &ment);
                return 0;
        }

+ if (mtab_does_not_exist() || !mtab_is_writable())
+ return 0;
+

        lock_mtab();

          if ((mtab = setmntent(MOUNTED, "a+")) == NULL) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Can't open " MOUNTED);

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At first blush, this seems reasonable to me. I assume you copied this logic from util-linux's mount command. Does the umount.nfs command also suffer from this problem? If it does, you should include a hunk to fix that as well.

To submit a patch for inclusion in nfs-utils, add a patch description (parts of the above paragraph will work) and a Signed-off-by: line, and send all of this with your diff in a text e-mail to [email protected], cc: [email protected].