Re: Bug#652011: general: Repeated pattern of FHS violation: Dependencies of /sbin and /bin, belong in /lib
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> Zachary Harris <zacharyharris@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> My understanding of the FHS would be that if a library is a dependency
>> of a binary in /bin or /sbin, then such library belongs in /lib, not
>> /usr/lib. (If for some reason the library is also desired in /usr/lib
>> then a sym link from /lib to /usr/lib, but not the other way around, is
>> acceptable.) A review of past bug reports (e.g. #633019 and #639939 from
>> this summer) shows that this policy gets repeatedly violated in Debian
>> until someone catches it.
>
> I'm increasingly convinced by the recent discussion on debian-devel that
> doing all the (rather substantial) work required to keep this separation
> working is a waste of our collective time. We're not doing a very good
> job at it anyway, chasing all the library dependencies is a fair amount of
> work, and things have to keep moving around as dependencies change. And
> this is all to support use cases that, while real, are fairly marginal in
> my estimation. This does not seem like the most effective place for us to
> be spending our time.
>
> I don't know if it's worth the effort to unify /bin and /usr/bin or the
> other similar things that have been discussed from time to time, but I do
> think it may be time for Debian to just officially say that we don't
> support /usr on a (meaningfully) separate partition from /bin and /lib,
> and that binaries in /bin may have dependencies on /usr/lib.
Absolutely NO, NO, NO. You can't just break all the systems out there
that do have a seperate /usr partition.
And that isn't what was suggested. The suggested approach is to have
/usr mounted in initramfs (or in one of the first boot scripts).
So what Debian could officially say is that /usr will be mounted and
packages may freely use it at any time during boot. That the seperation
of / and /usr becomes unimportant because both will always be available.
But before any of that happens please first show us a working
implementation of mounting /usr from initramfs and as first thing during
boot. And that should probably be included in a stable release before
the seperation of / and /usr is declared meaningless.
MfG
Goswin
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