On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 12:44:34PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote: > On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:25 AM, Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> wrote: > > Well, that's the issue at hand. The reason I mentioned this is > > because I believe that the / and /usr separation is a case where we > > should stop to consider the "bigger picture" rather than just the > > immediate problem. Solving that would solve the /usr/lib and /lib > > issue as a natural consequence. > > What about the other stuff in /usr? games, include, local, share, src? Well, they end up on / to give you /games, /include, /local, /share and /src. Because /usr is a symlink to /, these are still accessible as /usr/games, /usr/include etc. for full backward compatibility. > > All locations managed by dpkg must be considered a unified whole; it > > does not make any sense to share one part and not another. They must > > be updated together or else the system will be left in a broken and > > inconsistent state. A separate /usr is no longer required to boot the > > system now we have initramfs. In consequence, there's no reason to > > have /bin separate from /usr/bin, /lib from /usr/lib etc. It makes > > sense to have /var separate (writable). It makes no sense to have /usr > > separate. > > You're right. Is there a project goal for this yet? No, that's one of the reasons I've brought it up. Practically speaking, this can be done fairly easily. There's no need to ban having a separate /usr at all. Having /usr as a symlink to / just needs to be a supported option. This would need: • lintian checks to look for a package using the same path in /usr and / (which would result in one being overwritten). This would become a bug; currently it's allowed. Fixing such broken packages would be a prerequisite to allowing this. • The installer would allow installation of a new system without /usr. It could even be the default eventually, but would allow a separate /usr if you partitioned it with one. (But for new installs, what would be the point?) • Some features currently break with a separate /usr. Rather than spending lots of effort on supporting these with hacks (as for the crypto stuff) and shuffling bits of packages between /usr and /, we could simply indicate that they don't work with a separate /usr (we can even detect this and warn appropriately). Obviously given the fact that we have widespread usage of separate /usr, we would need to allow upgrades of such systems for the forseeable future. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature