Re: usrmerge -- plan B?
On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 15:00:41 +0000, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Moving config from /etc to below /usr becomes useful for containers, and
> hence clusters.
Both that and merged /usr are particularly useful for containers and
close-to-stateless embedded systems, but they are orthogonal. Please don't
conflate them. I am broadly in favour of both, but I don't want people
to be advocating one for reasons that actually only support the other.
Merged /usr (the rest of this thread) is about taking the static parts
of the root directory (/bin, /sbin, /lib*, /usr) and putting them all in
/usr, so that the only files that are mandatory in the root directory
are /etc, standard compatibility symlinks to keep paths like /bin/sh
working (which can be created during boot by systemd-tmpfiles or similar
if the root filesystem is a tmpfs or otherwise initially empty), and
the standard top-level directories (all of which, except /etc, can be
a separate filesystem if desired).
Moving system integration hooks and configuration defaults from /etc to
/usr is about taking the parts of the root directory for which sysadmin
edits are a supported action, and dividing them into the parts the
sysadmin could conceivably override in future but probably won't[0]
(in /usr or /lib[1]), and the parts the sysadmin has actually overridden
(files in /usr or /lib[1] overridden or "masked" by files in /etc).
If you combine the two, the parts of the root filesystem that cannot be
separated into a /usr or /var filesystem become very small.
smcv
[0] In principle every file in /etc needs to be editable or overridable
by *someone*, some sysadmins edit more than others, and some
files need to be edited in all or nearly all systems; but in
historical/current Debian practice the typical number of edits per
system is a lot smaller than the number of files present in /etc.
[1] If you have unmerged /usr then a minority of these overridable
files are in /lib; the only examples I can think of right now are
/lib/udev/rules.d/* and /lib/systemd/system/*. If you also have
merged /usr then that's the same thing as /usr/lib anyway.
Reply to: