On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 04:18:38 AM Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Monday 12 September 2011 21:31:09 Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > They could have put everything on /usr 30 years ago, if they'd have seen > > fit. They saw then good reason not to. What you and KS seem oblivious > > to is the reason for /bin, /sbin. It is to allow a small boot so as to > > permit system maintenance - fsck, resizing or moving partions, even > > undeleting files - all these things are difficult, or even impossible > > perhaps, if the pertinent partition is mounted. > > It wouldn't be everyone's favourite method, but for those purposes I always > install a small rescue system at the end of the the disk, with its own entry > in grub.conf, and with fstab and mount points arranged for convenient > maintenance. > > And nowadays, of course, the ready availability of rescue systems on USB, CD > etc saves you even having to set that up if you prefer not to. That might > not be useful on server farms, though.
You'd still need to keep those updated with current versions and tools. Even for my desktop I find that a non-usable solution. The rescue-systems are nice, for when my system won't boot at all. The likelihood of needing a rescue-cd/usb/... will increase substantially when all partitions need to be mounted even before init starts. Especially as I don't expect an automated tool that will keep the init* updated after EVERY emerge/kernel-compile/.... I see a requirement for every ebuild to add the following: *** pseude-code *** if ebuild part of set in init* then rebuild init* ******* When the rebuild part ever breaks, the whole boot-process will break. We'll be making Linux worse then MS Windows 95. -- Joost
