On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 07:03:10PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > > I'd still like to know what the compelling reason for the change is > > though. > Apparently the reason is simply that our upstreams (who it sounds like > are predominantly driven by Redhat folks) are dropping support for / > and /usr on different partitions and that re-adding that support or > maintaining the existing support is too much work for the Debian > maintainers involved. At least that is what started the thread. Things > like this is why getting involved upstream is important for Debian > maintainers and probably why items 2 and 4 exist in our social contract. > I would encourage those who care about this issue to start getting > involved in the relevant places and submitting patches. It sounds like > the ability to run a system with split / and /usr is *very* likely to > disappear unless people who care decide to work in it. I don't think that sounds very likely at all, because so far *no one* has provided *any* evidence in this thread, or in any upstream discussions I've been able to find, of any regressions that would be introduced into Debian by upstream's "not supporting" starting udev before mounting /usr. "It's too much work to move the libraries to /lib" is nonsense and no justification at all. Our build systems don't make installing libraries to /lib as easy as they should, but it's not actually difficult, and no one who finds this genuinely difficult has any business being the maintainer of a library so core that it's needed at boot time by the system anyway. It's certainly far less work for the handful of affected libraries to be moved than it is to make countless users repartition their systems! The one and only example I've ever seen of an upstream decision that would impact the bootability of existing initramfsless systems with a separate /usr was a udev rule that would inject name information from /usr/share/misc/pci.ids into the udev database, *for consumption by other applications*. This would be a gratuitous incompatibility; no one appeared to be arguing that this information needed to be there for the benefit of udev itself. But I believe the decision has since been reversed upstream anyway. If someone would give even *one* example where something legitimately needed by a udev rule could not be moved from /usr to / without breaking interfaces or otherwise complicating matters, then that would be worth discussing. But so far, nobody has done so - having to move shared libraries between directories certainly doesn't qualify - so I continue to regard this as just so much upstream FUD. On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 08:00:50PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > The package that started the thread was udev, there are examples of > libs that need to be in /lib in the beginning of #652011. Yes, and it's a rather short list. I'll be happy to provide patches for these packages. On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 08:25:12PM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote: > No, it's not about "patches". More and more things just need /usr at > boot time, and the solution is to mount it in the initramfs. > The only alternative would be to keep moving stuff from /usr to /, which > kind of defeats its purpose. I don't agree that it defeats the purpose to move libraries needed at boot time to /; I think that given the wide range of uses to which Debian is put, it's important for us to be disciplined about the size of our base system and our startup, and keeping track of the libs in /lib is one tool that helps with this. So rather than defeating the purpose, I would say that requiring libs used in early boot to move to /lib provides a useful deterrent against growing the system unnecessarily. > Also, mounting /usr in the initramfs allows to explore the / to /usr > move, which if practical will bring many benefits and allow supporting > new features. I think I've heard of one new feature, full-filesystem snapshotting, that this would enable. I can see that this would be useful and that some people may want to do it, and that this is worth exploring; I only object to requiring people to choose between /usr as a separate partition and initramfsless booting if it's not necessary. -- 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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