On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Steven J. Long <[email protected]> wrote: > It's funny how you always discuss those two options and consistently fail to > mention > the one option that allows people who never needed an initramfs before to > continue > without one, and still use udev in line with upstream requirements, but there > it is: > > http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901206.html
If we clarify the decision (which seems increasingly likely as there seems to be demand), I'd suggest we would vote on something like: On Gentoo we (do, do not) support configurations that do not place /usr on the root filesystem without an early-boot mechanism to mount it (eg an initramfs, early-running script, init replacement, etc). When I use the term initramfs it is intended just as a stand-in. That said, I think that the initramfs is honestly the cleanest solution for early-boot setup as it supports a huge variety of configurations. However, the actual policy would be more general, and the options that are available to users will be whatever the community is willing to supply/support. If anybody considers that ambiguous in any way please speak up now. As far as my own position goes, I'll be voting for do not. That doesn't mean that I think that maintainers should look to make dramatic changes overnight - we should still be sending out news/etc. I think that maintainers have made a sufficient case that this is where the winds are blowing. I was pretty concerned about this when the topic came up early last year, but I found getting dracut working wasn't hard (it is easier and more robust now) and brought a number of benefits beyond just mounting /usr. My root is now on lvm+mdadm, and I have a separate /usr and /var and it all works just fine (they're bind-mounts on top of yet another mount). When I build a new kernel it only takes one line to build an initramfs to go with it. Rich
