On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Michał Górny <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:40:12 +0100 > Ciaran McCreesh <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:35:58 -0500 >> Canek Peláez Valdés <[email protected]> wrote: >> > All the arguments for keeping /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin >> > separated are really instances of the Chewbacca defense [1]. They >> > just don't make any sense. >> >> All the arguments for changing things are just realising that the >> horse has fled the barn and then trying to rationalise not needing a >> horse. > > I believe I don't need a horse. I don't even have a barn either.
To carry the analogy, udev forcing a /usr merge is much like "We don't need a horse, so we don't think anyone else should have one, either. If they need a horse, they can use one of those newfangled tractors." Personally, I think the original reasoning behind udev's move was flawed. When I read it, it sounded like "we can't control whether or not anyone else puts boot-required packages into /usr before /usr has been mounted. In order to cover for those packages, we'll force the issue by putting ourselves there." I think that any package which puts boot-required things into a path which may not be available at boot time is inherently broken, and needs to be fixed. There's absolutely nothing about the move which both accounts for boot-required packages requiring access to /var _and_ a sysadmin's need to have /var as a special mount point. To me, it looks a lot like what once was / is now expected to be an initramfs, which I find extraordinarily problematic, for the following reasons: 1) There are no truly mature tools for automatically generating and installing an initramfs based on system requirements. Canek likes to recommend dracut, which still isn't marked stable. I've gotten stable genkernel to work reasonably, but its error reporting is terrible. 2) There's no good means for applying software and security updates to an initramfs. If having an initramfs is to be considered the new normal, there should be some means of updating it as part of routine system updates. 3) With an initramfs and the tools to generate it, we have more moving parts were previously there were few. -- :wq
