Re: support for merged /usr in Debian
On Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:28:14 -0800, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
wrote:
>I do understand why people working in the embedded space care about some
>unusual mount orderings, file system separations, and very light cores,
>and I hope that we can accomodate and support all of their use cases
>inside Debian. I think that's the most productive part of this thread.
We have already shown how "much" we care about the users of non-Linux
kernels in Debian ("not at all, they can happily go fishing").
I have no doubt that we're going to do the same thing to embedded
users if we can trade those users for a few seconds per year in
startup time.
And I fear that we're going to lose a few more important contributors
that way.
And we're all doing this to keep our upstreams and Ubuntu happy. Is it
worth this?
>But I don't get why people who are using non-embedded UNIX systems
>particularly care.
I, for example, am afraid of having to merge /usr in existing systems
during upgrades, causing repartitions to be necessary. I am afraid of
partition layout suddenly not fitting any more during an upgrade,
causing downtimes and customers considering to take the opportunity to
migrate to a really supported enterprise distribution.
And, I really don't want to have to adapt, test and verify scripts and
backup schemes to changed partition layout. This will be necessary for
new systems, and it is really a horror vision to have to do this for
existing systems during upgrades.
>If you've used UNIX for a long time, you've seen
>binaries in all sorts of bizarre and irritating locations. This is minor
>compared to the organizational differences between various commercial
>UNIXes back in the day.
I decided for Debian to get rid of this. Now we're planning to cause
this _inside_ Debian.
>> There is no such thing as a single user mode boot with only the rootfs
>> anymore.
>
>Yes, there is. The rootfs just includes /usr.
Which is, in my case, the case for a single-digit number of tiny VMs
in a park of a couple of hundred systems with separate /usr. The
majory of those systems hasn't been reinstalled or even repartitioned
in years. Please don't force me to do that during an upgrade.
>> PS: And i hate giving up on technical issues.
>
>That's the whole thing, though. Maintaining a meaningful /bin and /lib
>vs. /usr split is not primarily a technical issue. It's a coordination
>issue. The technical work for a single package is painful only because
>moving things is really painful. The problem is more that it affects
>thousands of packages maintained by numerous different maintainers who are
>never testing that configuration and may not even be aware that it exists.
And it affects hundreds of thousands of installed systems.
>Another word for "giving up" is "applying sane prioritization." We can't
>fix every wishlist bug. Is this one actually worth the effort?
So it is a wishlist bug to keep things as broken as they were always
been?
Greetings
Marc
--
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Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
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