On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 08:39:41PM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote > >> You are only considering the case of /usr being on a plain hard disk >> partition, what if it in on an LVM volume, or encrypted (or both) >> of mounted over the network? All of these require something to be >> run before they can be mounted, and if that cannot be run until udev >> has started, we have been painted into a corner. > > I agree that there will always be a small number of corner-cases where > an initr* is required. What annoys me, and probably a lot of other > people, is the-dog-in-the-manger attitude > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_in_the_Manger where some people > seem to say "If my weirdo, corner-case system can't boot a separate /usr > without an initr* then, by-golly, I'll see to it that *NOBODY* can boot > a separate /usr without an initr*".
This is misleading in two ways. 1) You're talking as if having a functionally merged /usr and / system (i.e., many programs needed by the sysad to fix a non-booting system are in /usr, and programs in /usr will break if /usr is not in sync with /) is a weirdo corner case. It is NOT. It is very likely how the vast majority of Linux systems on the planet work. Separate /usr is itself the weirdo corner case. It was in fact a weirdo corner case since day 1. 2) You're talking as if Lennart or whoever is breaking into your systems and actively preventing you from customizing it to boot a separate /usr. If this is the case you _really_ need to change your ssh keys, they wiped that vulnerability a couple years ago. Nobody's preventing you from building a custom system that cleanly separates / and /usr. But hey, don't pretend that even Gentoo does it correctly. Besides the equery tests in this thread, I've never personally confirmed that any other distro does - and Fedora cleanly admits that they don't.
