Kai Krakow <[email protected]> writes: > Am Di., 10. März 2026 um 23:42 Uhr schrieb Duncan <[email protected]>: >> >> Sam James posted on Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:42:09 +0000 as excerpted: >> >> > One of the arts of working on Gentoo is balancing many different >> > concerns and becoming used to people doing unexpected things, and trying >> > to have both reasonable defaults while allowing people to do their own >> > thing. >> >> Just to say, as one such user doing unexpected things (reverse usr-merge >> with /usr -> . anyone? of course the not recommended USE="-* ..." is old >> news here, as is -* in /etc/portage/profile/packages to kill the entire >> @system set (with the full -package list to negate @system before portage >> began supporting -*, my comment in the file from the -* simplification >> update is dated 2017)). >> >> Even where not explicitly supported and in fact directly tested against in >> global profile scope, like an otherwise systemd profile on reverse usr- >> merge, Gentoo on "user did the unexpected" systems is /shockingly/ easy to >> maintain locally by a reasonably experienced gentooer, with very few >> patches (one to fix that profile test, a couple others to various packages >> or their ebuilds where upstream doesn't do the right thing if /usr is a >> symlink) actually needed and once they're setup it "just works". >> >> And what's nice, as long as I've been upfront with my "unexpecteds", my >> bug reports haven't been arbitrarily closed or otherwise discriminated >> against just because I'm "doing something that's not technically >> supported", where in fact that has nothing at all to do with the bug I >> actually reported. That wouldn't be the case with all distros, and gentoo >> deserves credit for it. >> >> Then there's the gentoo dev, floppym as it happens, that recently helped >> me spot a 20+ year latent local config bug that ultimately traced to the >> way I migrated users from Mandrake when I became a Gentooer back in 2004! > > Welcome to the club, I migrated from OpenSuSE back in around 2007. > >> I had /no/ clue, why should I after 20 years of it working without issue, >> and the available documentation (beyond the systemd code itself and the >> git log of the commit introducing it) simply didn't mention that as a >> trigger case and I was /all/ up the wrong tree following some case the >> docs did mention but that it turned out was only one case of the two, the >> other undocumented, but it all clicked into place when he mentioned the >> human user vs. system user config in /etc/login.defs and wondered if my >> human user UID might somehow be configured as a system user, and I >> recalled worrying about effects some 20 years earlier in that migration, >> effects that didn't actually trigger for 20 years! > > Funny, this sound *a lot* like what I reported here: > https://bugs.gentoo.org/970487
These sorts of things are part of how I keep going :) They're great fun (at the end) and most rewarding. > >> You sometimes read stories about old-timer Linux admins "doing the >> impossible" to rescue systems because it turns out it's not impossible >> after all if you don't reboot and lose existing running executables still >> functional after glibc goes poof in an upgrade gone bad, things like that. >> From where I sit floppym just ascended to the same near-$deity status in >> the parallel distro-dev space when he made that connection, while surely >> having literally no idea I had that sort of migration history... 20 years >> ago! Legend indeed! >> >> A very personal and public THANKS MAN! as he sure deserves it, but despite >> the legend, we know distros the size of Gentoo aren't all one person, and >> there's thanks to go around for all the other devs (and other testers and >> bug reporters and wiki and forums contributors too). > > Thanks for reporting this - so I'm not the only running hitting > strange old bugs I probably introduced myself like 20 years ago... :-D > > Regards, > Kai
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