On 2013-10-01 08:16, Alan McKinnon wrote: > There are many examples in /usr you could have used to illustrate your > point, such as many fuse modules. And yet you chose an imaginary space > invader game. > > Let's rather stick within the bounds of what is feasible, OK?
What can I say, I like to exaggerate... :-) But it seems you got my point. Although I would not rule out "Space Invaders" as either imaginary (it came out in 1978) nor infeasible (at boot). > But it's not just you. You are not running LFS, you are running Gentoo. > It has ebuilds and ebuilds put the generated files somewhere, and that > destination is the same for every user of that ebuild. Which is why I said what I said further down in the mail you replied to... > Unix, by design and unlike a traditional mainframe OS, does not > distinguish between different types of files and does limit where you > can put files. This has two consequences - you can do virtually anything > you like with it as everything is a file, and filesystem files and > structure have been moved out to human space in the hands of the > sysadmin/packager/maintainer/user or whatever. Some sanity must prevail. Yes, sanity is what I'm after but it seems I'm in the minority... > The Linux boot process can conceivably run any arbitrary code it needs > to run to get userspace into a runnable state. This can easily be code > that we haven't conceived of yet and becuase it is Unix, it could reside > anywhere. Also because it's Unix and because sysadmins have learned over > the years we constrain ourselves to putting the code in the bin, sbin > and lib directories in / and in /usr. > > Clearly, there is a massive distinction between code there and in say > /opt or /var/lib, that is why you won't find boot-critical code there. > But there is no such clear distinction between / and /usr. What *you* > think is not boot critical may be criticial for someone else. I couldn't agree more. However, since some devs (and I don't mean anyone in particular) have started to expect /usr to always be available for "boot-critical" software then what is to say that the next one *will* require /opt and/or /var/lib at boot time? And where do we make a distinction between a boot-critical thing and a non-boot-critical thing. For all I know there may actually be someone out there seriously considering adding "Space Invaders" as a boot thing for, say sysops that want to reboot a really big server and want to play while booting... I'm only kidding of course and hope noone takes this seriously!? ;-) > And here's the kicker: > > You don't get to decide for the other guy. But the packager gets to > support him, and has to edit ebuilds to install all the necessary code > not in /usr but in /. And they have to do this over and over and over, > and while they are doing that they have to answer users like you who are > complinaing about unneccessary rebuilds just to change the desitnation > of a few files. > > This is a no-win-ever situation for devs and they have decided they are > not doing it anymore and have made a decision to not support separate > /usr without initramfs. that is their right as you do not pay them a salary. > > This is the correct decision for Gentoo to have made, as the problem is > open ended and is never completed, plus there is no clear distinction > between what is boot critical in the general case and what is not. if > you can't see or understand that, then we have nothing more to discuss. > > If you don't like what Gentoo has done then I recommend you take it like > a man and fork. Assume the maintenanceburden yourself. I've already come to that conclusion myself (as, again, I mentioned in my mail further down). Bye, so long and thanks for the f*sh! Best regards Peter K
