Re: Merging / and /usr (was: jessie release goals)
On Wed, 8 May 2013 17:32:13 +0200, Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>
wrote:
>On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 12:19:25PM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
>> Fedora updates are different. (And so are Ubuntu updates, if one considers
>> that it's possible to provide fixup scripts to update-manager pre-upgrade.)
>> As long as we're supporting upgrades through plain apt, that's going to
>> be hard. Especially if you have non-distro packages installed that need
>> to be migrated as well, with the tracking information updated.
>
>Maybe the issue here shouldn't be changing the default. After all there
>is a quite vocal opposition to such a step. I fail to see consensus in
>the recent mails without even contributing a personal opinion here.
>
>So really what does it take to e.g. move /bin and stuff to /usr? Did
>anyone try that? Where is that documented? What problems did occur?
If we force a much bigger /, the chance of a broken / filesystem
increases. If / is fine, one has a chance to fix the system without
booting to rescue. So, a small / both decreases the probability of a
boot failure and makes fixing breakage easier.
If we change our software so that the system never gets beyond initrd
stage if mount /usr fails, we increase the change of breaking boot
because _two_ filesystems need to be fine and mounted before we leave
initrd.
Both changes are bad from a robustness point of view. Keeping the root
fs small was a good idea 20 years ago, and it still is.
Greetings
Marc
--
-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! -----
Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
Reply to: