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Re: udev and /usr



On Tue, Sep 01, 2009 at 05:24:19AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:

> > The issue was raised by the udev upstream maintainer along with the udev
> > package maintainers of the major distributions, who all agreed that this
> > configuration is not supported.
> FYI, udev 146 ships usb-id and pci-id programs which read

(ed: usb-db, pci-db)

> /usr/share/misc/usb.ids and /usr/share/misc/pci.ids .
> udev itself does not care about the results of these programs but other
> programs which used to use HAL may do, leading to subtle breakage.

Anything that used to use hal was dependent on an executable located in
/usr/sbin, so presumably all such packages already wait until /usr is
mounted before expecting results.

Why do programs need udev to read this information in at driver load time?
Why can't packages that need this information query it when they need it
(which is well after /usr is mounted), instead of expecting udev to provide
it?

What are the programs that are behaving this way, and why should we not
consider *those* to be buggy for expecting udev to feed it text strings out
of a database?

> There are no obvious workarounds and I have no plan to fight against
> this, if you need it to work on systems with a standalone /usr then
> feel free to persuade the relevant maintainers to move the files.

> I also opened #544503 because supporting a standalone /var looks like
> a worthwhile effort, while supporting updating usb.ids with a script
> instead of apt looks like a complete idiocy.

You are drawing an artificial distinction between /usr and /var which is not
consistent with the standard, nor with how I've been laying out my
filesystems for years.  I'm not going to refactor my disk layout on upgrade
to accomodate your (or udev upstream's, or that of the upstream of any of
these other programs) blatant disregard for the FHS.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org


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