swupdate configuration and overlayfs

[alex...@posteo.de]

Hi,

is there a simple mechanism to override individual entries in swupdate
configuration file (/etc/swupdate.cfg) without doing those changes in
the configuration file directly? Systemd, for example, has a mechanism
where you can use drop-in files that allow to override individual
configuration entries in its (default) configuration. This would be a
very convenient way to merge device specific configuration with
potential new configuration options that swupdate might introduce in the
future.

One more question, not nesscearly swupdate related but still update
related and that someone here on the list might have stumbled opon as
well: We are using an overlayfs to make our configuration persistent.
The lower dir is /etc and the upper dir is located on the persistent
/data partition. This is the mount command we use to create the overlay:

mount -n -t overlay \
-o workdir=$WORK_DIR \
-o lowerdir=/etc \
-o upperdir=/data \
-o index=off,xino=off,redirect_dir=off,metacopy=off \
/data /etc

Problem is that when we do remove a file that does exist exclusively in
the lower dir (file1.txt) and afterwards list the directory content with
ls we do get following output:

$ls
file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

$rm file1.txt

$ls
ls: ./file1.txt: No such file or directory
file2.txt file3.txt


Like expected, the file is not listed anymore but we do get an error
message ("No such file or directory"). When we list the directory with
using tree we do not get an error but the file still gets listed in the
output contrary to what we would expect. Any hint on why this does
happen or how to solve this would be very appreciated.

Kind regards,
Alexis