On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Daniel Campbell <li...@sporkbox.us> wrote: > Anyway, I'm not in favor of FHS _per se_, but it sounds pretty > reasonable to have some semblance of order among where different parts > of a system go. Shoving everything into /usr and symlinking everything > else seems like a stop-gap or good-enough solution that came about due > to ignoring the existing standard (FHS) and refusing to try to change > it. I could be wrong, though. My point is I'm not dogmatic about it; I > just think that if the FOSS community were willing, a better solution > could be crafted.
It's true that it's nice to have a semblance of order where different parts go. But "all libraries and binaries in /usr" is also a semblance of order. You don't separate stuff for the sake of separating stuff. You separate them because you have a good reason to separate them. It turns out that there isn't a good reason to separate them, and that there's no way to predictably separate them. Mushing them together isn't just a stop-gap or good-enough solution. The idea of keeping system-critical separate from non-critical was not maintainable in the long run to begin with. >> If you were in the shoes of the ebuild packagers, you would be hard-pressed >> to >> predict which packages belong in the / PREFIX and which ones in /usr PREFIX, >> 100 times out of 100. But you need 100 times out of 100 or you'll get >> people whining >> that they can't boot or whining that they need to do some migration. That's >> why / and /usr separation is broken. >> > I agree, but perhaps the / and /usr separation is a symptom of a greater > problem instead of being the problem in and of itself. Like Inception, > maybe we need to go further. :P The greater problem is what I'm pointing out already. Even in principle, you just can't predict which files belong in /. It's always been a case-by-case, system-by-system thing, and it just so happens that 99.9xxx% of the cases are the same. Distro packagers, however, have to decide for 100% of the cases. So they're going to end up making weird decisions that are easy for you to second-guess but are actually tough. If you want to solve the "hard problem", you want to create a tool that will automate / and /usr migrations. Portage has to be aware of the tool and maybe 100% of ebuilds will have to be rewritten to take advantage of the dynamic prefixes set by the tool. That solves it for good, and you can have your / and /usr separate. But only for gentoo. Every package manager needs to have a similar tool and similar intelligence for that to work. -- This email is: [ ] actionable [x] fyi [x] social Response needed: [ ] yes [x] up to you [ ] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate [ ] soon [x] none
