On 13 October 2011 20:58, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > 2011/10/13 Olivier Crête <tes...@gentoo.org>: >> We're imposing our deep integration because it's the only way to make a >> compelling platform that "just works", forcing users to tell the >> computer something the computer already knows is just plain lazy and >> stupid. > > I'd also look at it another way. It is a lot easier to take a > well-integrated platform and chop out the parts that you don't need, > than to take a million pieces and build yourself an integrated > platform.
While it has been the way just about all platform development on Linux has taken place, what this mode of thinking ignores is that gratuitously supporting as many corner cases as you can means that you need to support a combinatorial explosion of pieces, which so far has only managed to keep our stack fragmented and an enormous pita to work with. I'm not saying we should narrow our focus too much, but every decision to support weird ways of doing things has a cost, and if you're going to support it, you (as an upstream developer) are spending time that could possibly have been spent making the whole system better. (that's to set some perspective on why things are heading the way they are, and discussing whether this is sensible or not probably is going to spin offtopic for gentoo-dev really quickly) While I've seen a lot of whining about this whole issue, I certainly haven't been seen any effort to actually solve the problem within the existing framework. For example, if someone cares enough, why not write a wrapper script to track down the programs and libraries at runtime that actually do use /usr so it's easier to say "these packages install rules that need / and /usr on the same partition". -- Arun Raghavan http://arunraghavan.net/ (Ford_Prefect | Gentoo) & (arunsr | GNOME)
