On 19/08/2013 16:33, pk wrote: > Using an initramfs means you duplicate parts of your OS and copy them > into the kernel or using a tool (like dracut or genkernel). If you need > it from a technical point of view (bluetooth keyboard), that's fine but > if I don't have any hardware that requires it then why use an initramfs? > I guess it's a matter of taste (or "philosophy" if you will)... An > initramfs seems like bandaid to me (and it is).
I snipped most of the thread as I don't want to revisit yet again and old horse that is much flogged already :-) We're not too different, you and I, if I may dare say it when we differ it's you tend a little more towards idealism and I towards realism. Yes, bluetooth sucks, but it was designed by what was available at the time and it's what we have. For that matter USB, spinning disks and lack of fibre into my house also suck, but we have to work with what we have and what we certainly will have soon. Same with initramfs. Does it suck? Of course it does, it just sucks less than any other realistic proposal I've ever seen. And tricky bootstrap problems are tricky - always have been since the 50s and always will be. Which brings me to what I am really trying to say - giving specific examples to highlight general problems is always a nasty road to navigate. Like bluetooth keyboards, there's always a non-trivial number who can claim that the example does not apply to *them*. One can go round and round in circles with that, and skirt the actual issue: Software exists in the context of something bigger and for us that often means "maximally useful for the maximum number of folks inclined to use such a package" and that sweet spot includes compromises; some things just have to be laid in stone so that everything else works at all - sometimes we just have to accept that. Let's look at /usr by comparing it to /opt. I like /opt - all the crap from Oracle, IBM, Sybase and Sun my managers shove on me goes in there where I can at least corral it. I can agree with that setup. I can even agree with a "system" vs "userspace" split ala / vs /usr, although the distinction is very murky indeed, but do I really need it? Yes, it can be useful and even if I make a case for it, does it really need to be it's own partition? I'm carefully dodging around the niche market for terminal servers and /usr mounted over NFS here. I respectfully submit that we could also solve that one using full PXE boot, automount and unionfs or brethren. Like I said earlier, software exists in the context of something bigger, and Gentoo exists in the context of the FOSS community. We consume much more code than we produce and sometimes we have to back down and go with what the world is doing or be prepared to fork. Incidentally, I don't see that anyone has ever proposed the obvious sword to cut this knot - have the kernel automount /usr. it already does / and we have root= ... it wouldn't be hard to add /usr= ... Yes, I know I'm being stupid and Linus would reply with two words, the first starting with an f. He'd tell us to solve it the right way even if that's the hard way. I believe separate /usr without initramfs is rapidly becoming white elephant material, and we are faced with a decision to do it the hard way. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
