On Sat, 2 Jan 2016 10:06:54 +0100 Didier Kryn <k...@in2p3.fr> wrote: > Le 02/01/2016 03:44, Stephanie Daugherty a écrit : > > Regardless of who proposed it, merged /usr is still a reckless > > change > that needlessly complicates things. > > > Hey Stephanie. > > The simple fact of splitting executables between two different > directories *is* a complication; merging them back would be a > *simplification* :-).
The preceding is true. It's obviously simpler to put all the distro-installed executables in one directory. However... The Unix community has a long tradition of splitting the one-tree filesystem into mounted partitions, and there are several excellent reasons to have /usr on its own partition. Once /usr is on its own partition, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/lib are unavailable without mounting, and where are the executables needed to mount them? Oops! But there's a solution: Initramfs! Cool! Except that initramfs is one or two more orders of magnitude more complicated than executable splitting. So the slight simplification of merging directories buys you a huge complication of initramfs black-boxism. And one thing Stephanie said keeps ringing in my ears: Until very recently, you could take it to the bank that you could substitute /bin/bash in your grub line, and come up to a working OS, where you could look around, and see what it takes to mount things and get everything running, and craft your rc file. But now you come up in some purgatory where you have to learn a whole nother file hierarchy before manually doing your switch_root or pivot_boot, and only then can you use /bin/bash the way she suggested. And take it from me, on Ubuntu that's a long, long road. > I've read, from a guy who followed the story, > that it was originally split because the first disk was too small. Not really. He mounted a second volume becuase the first disk was too small. He split executables to accommodate mounted volumes. We still have mounted volumes, and so far nobody's talking about getting rid of them. So we still very much have the same reasons to split executables. Or substitute a huge black box initramfs for executable splitting. DISCLAIMER... I pick my battles. I'll fight to the death to keep systemd away from my PID1. I'd fight hard to minimize or eliminate all systemd software from my box because once the camel gets his nose in the tent, the next thing you know the whole camel's sleeping next to you. It would be wonderful to have a no-systemd udev, so the Poetterists don't have a single point of failure they can invoke at will on my system, but so far the systemd-encumbered udev still works with normal systems. Hey, if I had all my druthers, there'd be no dbus on my system. In the hierarchy described in the preceding paragraph, re-splitting the executables fits in somewhere between no-systemd udev and no dbus. It would be nice, but I could easily live without it. So why am I involved in this discussion at all? Because there's a debate over whether the merge aids the Poetterists, and there's no doubt about that in my mind: It does. And like Stephanie said several posts back, it sure was nice to set your grub command to /bin/sh, and come up in a working (though not fully mounted) operating system. SteveT Steve Litt January 2016 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting http://www.troubleshooters.com/28 _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
