Just to elaborate a little on what John said... > From: John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> .. > ARC Review is a discussion among senior engineers about the impact of > a project on OpenSolaris. The views expressed by the participants > certainly aren't set by Sun management, don't necessarily reflect > those of our sponsors, and probably won't even be understood by them. > In general, they are opinions based on past experience, and many > times reflect deep understandings of problems in areas that others > didn't even realize existed.
Its also very important that if possible these "opinions" are tempered by previous ARC actions. The cases and discussion are religiously recorded. That's not to say that we can't change our opinion and act to the contrary of a previous decision. We live in a changing world and must adapt. However, when we go against a previous decision we want to realize that we are doing so with good reason, not just because of a whim or (more likely) change in membership. This is quite relevant here. In 15 years of recorded ARC cases there are undoubtedly more than a few instances of a project requesting to be located on root. The response has uniformly been "Is this an editable per machine configuration file (/etc), a per machine log (or spool) file (/var) or a utility need for early boot (/sbin)?" Note that I didn't mention /lib because until very recently it didn't really exist (was a symlink to /usr/lib for SVr2 compatibility). We recently changed the implementation of root to allow dynamic linking before /usr was mounted, but we didn't change the semantic. So this case (or at least the /sbin little corner of it) is requesting that 15 years of precedence of semantic consistancy be reversed because of the often previously cited reason of "somebody wants it". We've said no before and in the absence of new information, we seem likely to say no again. Frankly, I'm very perplexed about why the project team and various posters are so married to this tweak to a much larger and important project. In the large scheme of things, is this important to the project team? And yes, at least to this ARC member, maintaining the semantics of the root slice is important and should not be altered in the context of this case. It it is to be altered, a case should be presented that only focuses on the semantic so we can have a bounded discussion. - jek3
