@alexandergall, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @domenkozar and @dezgeg to be potential reviewers.

Have you tried making an initrd with this? Afaik it can not depend on external nix store paths except $out

My understanding was that with the current cloud-init, growpart is not intended to be run from initrd. IIRC, that was necessary up to kernel 3.8. So, unless it is expected to work for old kernels, this should be a non-issue, but I admit that I don't know whether that's the case or whether this version of growpart actually still supports that method.

Note that this fix is required for #28008, which has already been merged. How can I progress this PR?

It gets called from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/virtualisation/grow-partition.nix#L36 if you are have autoResize option turned on for a filesystem.

I still think it's needed there, so we should fix the symlink if it's broken.

This stuff is pretty convoluted :/ But I think this patch is still fine. The module you refer to arranges that all dependencies are copied to the bin directory for the extra-utils in the initrd. It explicitly copies the original growpart, not the one with the wrapper from the cloud-utils package. So, the $out/bin I have removed here doesn't matter for the grow-partition.nix module.

The symlink is clearly not needed here (and broken for this package) and neither is it needed for growpart to work in grow-partition.nix.

Am I missing something?

To me it seems that the growpart is patched before the wrapper is made. So it uses the unwrapped patched growpart.

But I agree that full Nix paths should be used in the package and then sed-ed out for the initrd.

A good way to test is to run $ nix-build nixos/tests/ec2.nix -A boot-ec2-nixops

What I'm trying to say is that the patching of growpart seems utterly pointless. The gnused package only contains the command sed and the gawk package contains gawk as well as awk (as a symlink), so the original growpart is perfectly fine as a regular package and also as part of the initrd, because the same dependencies are present there. I don't understand the purpose of the de-tour via gnused, which is not in the gnused package. Maybe this is a relic of the past?

So, no sed-ing and sym-linking is necessary in either case (at least not for growpart).

I ran that test and growpart completes without error

...
machine# NOCHANGE: partition 1 is size 20969439. it cannot be grown
...

At that point, it has used both, sed and awk AFAICT.

Is that sufficient? I don't know what the expected result of the test is.

Can you please advise how to proceed? I would really like to get this into 17.09.

@alexandergall mostly because my lack of time. I'll help you get it to 17.09. Sorry!

@alexandergall I'll check over the weekend.

@alexandergall this is now supedseeded by #30018 - does it look ok to you?

@domenkozar yes, that solves my issue. This PR can be closed. Thanks.

Sorry for taking so long :)