I do not want to roll back 40 years of progress. Actually, I was thinking about this last night. I started programming 47 years ago. My first system was one where I learned to punch binary on an 80 column card. The mass storage device was a card punch. We learned how to use a card sorter. Later, things improved to where I was able to use a paper based line printer and punched tape. What a joy it was in the 70's to use a 'glass tty' where you could edit one line at a time.
My first high level language was FORTRAN. Not Fortran II or FORTRAN IV. The original FORTRAN. My wife says she should have know better when out 'dates' consisted of going to the computer center to wait for output. My first 'home' computer cost $2000 and I had to put it together with a soldering iron. I remember buying 16K RAM for $150 and my first 80M hard drive for the bargain price of $600. Why that's less than $1 per M! My, how things have changed! The problem with the current environment is not that we continue to progress, but that a very few people are making changes in a very autocratic way. These guys are very smart, but they are making changes to fix their relatively exotic problems in a way that affects me when I do not have those problems. For me, it's not broke, so don't force me to 'fix' it. I am not really against combining /bin and /usr/bin, etc. The reason that they were separate in the first place was that disks were small and expensive. Today we have technical problems that force the change. The MSDOS or PC98 standard for the Master Boot Record does not support addresses greater than 2T. We want to boot from all types of devices: IDE Drives, SCSI Drives, USB Drives, SATA Drives, CDROM Drives, DVD Drives, Network Cards, Partitions formatted as RAID, LVM, EXT2/3/4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, encrypted drives, etc. And that's just for Linux and doesn't count other OSs. My problem with the newer systems is that they want to create a 'one size fits all' system. There is only one legitimate reason for an initramfs -- to mount the root directory. This is what the /usr, /bin, /sbin, and /lib directories were for. Now I agree that mounting the rootfs in every case is beyond the scope of the kernel, but why does every combination have to be supported? Does /usr really need to be encrypted? Does it *need* to be on an LVM partition? Use one ext4 partition for /, one for /boot, and put everything else on an LVM partition and the boot process becomes quite straight forward. No initramfs and it's accompanying opaqueness required. Do we need systemd, a complex compiled system, to boot? My LFS boots in 8 seconds now. Is that too long? Sure there are other issues, but I haven't seen them. Why is upstream 'fixing' my system that is not broken? -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
