Re: [gentoo-dev] gen_usr_ldscript & --libdir=/lib

[William Hubbs]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 01:49:50PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 12:03 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > As I and others have said on this list a thousdand times, moving
> > everything to /usr never had anything to do with systemd and udev. This
> > is a completely separate topic.
>
> Understood.  However, the whole request to not have to support a
> separate /usr without an initramfs was brought up by the udev team.
> If udev doesn't have the need, then they should just go do what they
> want to do and stop asking the council to step in, as there apparently
> isn't anything for them to decide on.
 
 I wasn't actually asking the council to step in. I was just trying to
 have a discussion here.

> >
> > The arguments for moving everything into /usr seem to be pretty strong
> > [1], and as gregkh and others have said, it would benefit us in the longrun
> > to do it.
> >
> > Given that, that is not even what I'm discussing. I am just discussing
> > moving the libraries that we manually install into /lib* back to
> > /usr/lib* on Linux.
>
> I think moving everything into /usr is a good idea.  However:
>
> 1.  It isn't my decision to make.  This is the role of the Council.

Tell me if I am wrong here. My understanding is that this is only true
if the community itself doesn't make the decision first.

> 2.  It doesn't make sense for every dev to just stick stuff wherever
> they personally feel is best.
> 3.  Moving just a bunch of libraries to /usr and nothing else is dumb.
>  It brings none of the benefits of the /usr move, and gets rid of all
> of the benefits of complying with FHS (like systems booting fine with
> a separate /usr - and yes I know this is already "broken" despite the
> fact that it works just fine for 99% of the people running in this
> configuration).  This is one of those situations where you need to
> have a plan and do it right, or don't do it at all.
 
 Ok, I can agree with this.

> If people want to argue for a /usr move by all means do so.  If people
> want to beg the Council to back this, by all means do so.  If people
> want to run for Council by all means do so.  If you want to build a
> mechanism that gives the choice to the end user based on a profile
> setting or some other sensible mechanism, by all means do so.
>
> But, until the Council decides that we're really doing a coordinated
> /usr move, then let's leave things alone.  Sticking stuff in random
> locations per the whim of individual maintainers will cause nothing
> but trouble.
 
 There was a long thread a while back where the /usr merge was discussed
 in depth and there was no escalation to the council to make the
 decision [1]. Unless I don't remember something significant out of that
 thread, we agreed that even though some of us don't like the /usr
 merge, it is probably a good thing for us to do it in the longrun.

If I were to start that thread now, I would change my introduction to
not specifically mention udev, systemd and kmod, but my view still is
that it will be better for us in the longrun if we do it. Maybe that is
a topic for another thread though.

William

[1]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_c3c5bdabbe058b08627ff04cee896af3.xml