Re: support for merged /usr in Debian
Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> writes:
> On Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:28:14 -0800, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
> wrote:
>>But I don't get why people who are using non-embedded UNIX systems
>>particularly care.
>
> I, for example, am afraid of having to merge /usr in existing systems
> during upgrades, causing repartitions to be necessary. I am afraid of
> partition layout suddenly not fitting any more during an upgrade,
> causing downtimes and customers considering to take the opportunity to
> migrate to a really supported enterprise distribution.
Are you afraid of your /usr partition being too small to hold the
additional binaries from /bin, /sbin and /lib? If that is the case,
won't it also be too small for regular distribution upgrades?
Remember that / and /usr don't have to reside on the same partition with
the usrmerge proposal: they only have to be both available
post-initramfs. The initramfs already takes care to mount /usr (for the
systemd case as initscripts needs updates for sysvinit as was said
elsewhere). So no repartitioning should be required on upgrades.
> And, I really don't want to have to adapt, test and verify scripts and
> backup schemes to changed partition layout. This will be necessary for
> new systems, and it is really a horror vision to have to do this for
> existing systems during upgrades.
I wouldn't expect much changes to be needed for backups: if you excluded
/bin, /sbin, /lib and /usr, then it would be enough to just exclude /usr
in the future. If you included them, they will still be included.
Ansgar
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