Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: eudev project announcement

[Greg KH]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 08:21:36AM +0100, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On Mon, December 17, 2012 22:31, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 09:03:40PM +0100, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> >> Olav Vitters <olav@×××××××.nl> wrote:
> >>
> >> >On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 09:29:26AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> >> >> As I said in an earlier email, Lennart Poettering claims that it does
> >> >> not work. We are discussing some of the things necessary to make it
> >> >work.
> >> >
> >> >Just to repeat:
> >> >In this thread it was claimed that a separate /usr is not supported by
> >> >systemd/udev.
> >> >
> >> >A case which works with latest systemd on various distributions. I
> >> >checked with upstream (not Lennart), and they confirmed it works. I can
> >> >wait for Lennart to say the same, but really not needed.
> >> >
> >> >I assume this will again turn into a "but I meant something else".
> >>
> >> Olav.
> >>
> >> Lennart has stated that he considers a seperate /usr without init*
> >> broken.
> >
> > Yes, as do I, and so do a lot of other developers.
>
> It is only "broken", because upstream decided to move everything into /usr
> that was previously in /.

No, not at all, please see the web page that describes, in detail, the
problems that has been going on for quite some time now, with the /usr
and / partitions and packages.
	http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken

One good solution to this issue is to move everything into /usr, and
that's something that has wonderful benifits in the long run, and is
something that I expect all Linux distros to eventually implement.
Those that don't, will suffer because of it.

Again, see the web page for why moving stuff into /usr is a good idea
for the reasons behind this.
	http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

> >> This has worked correctly in the past.
> >
> > Define "past" please.
>
> Recent past, like a few months ago no errors during boot and the system
> running stable.

You have gotten lucky, see the above links for why.

> Please provide a simple way to let me see that it is broken on systems
> that do not use bluetooth keyboards.

Again, see the above link for how to do this.

> The requirement of having userspace working to have input devices working
> seems to be related to bluetooth, not to USB or PS/2 keyboards.

Not at all, see the above link.

> And using a bluetooth connection to access a NFS share is, in my humble
> opinion, a corner case that requires additional work to make it work.

One person's "corner case" is another person's default operating mode.

> > Note, it's still broken, I have yet to see any upstream fixes to resolve
> > all of the issues that are involved here with "fixing" this up.
>
> Reverting back to an older version makes it work.

Because of how we package udev?

> Using "mdev" also works.

mdev is not recommended for desktop or server systems, but feel free to
use it if you want.

> > Yes, as always, for some subset of users, you can be lucky and it will
> > work for them, but those systems are getting rarer and rarer these days,
> > as the rest of upstream (not systemd here) are moving on and not doing
> > anything to change their behavior for this topic.
>
> Why rarer? Any system I can buy in a random shop will work using a
> seperate /usr, provided the software is installed sanely.

Again, see above for why this is not true.

> By moving everything into /usr, this brokenness is forced upon users.

Not at all, but that's a separate topic than what we are talking about
here.

> >> The direction udev development is going, according to Lennart, is to
> >> make that impossible and he refuses to fix this regression.
> >
> > Again, this has NOTHING to do with udev or systemd, as has been pointed
> > out numerous times.  I understand your _wish_ that it would have
> > something to do with it, but that will not change the facts, sorry.
>
> Then what does it have to do with?
> When it was made public that it is considered "broken", the news came from
> udev-upstream. This was before most systems encountered any breakage.

That is because things were failing silently for some people, and not so
silently for others.  Now udev warns about this type of situation,
shooting the messenger is usually a bad idea.

> >> I am really happy with this project and intend on testing it once
> >> requests for this appear in the eudev mailing list.
> >
> > Good luck, the root problems still remain, and nothing that eudev ever
> > does can resolve that, sorry.
> >
> > Can this topic finally be put to rest please?  There is a whole web page
> > devoted to this topic, why do people blindly ignore it?
>
> Where is this page?
> I've read the page written by Lennart. Is there a decent (as in, going
> into detail why it is broken and what it is caused by) analysis about the
> "problem"?

See above for the links and the details.

> > Again, a separate /usr without an initrd has NOTHING to do with systemd
> > or udev, with the minor exception that Gentoo's packaging of those
> > programs _might_ have an issue, but that is Gentoo's issue, NOT
> > upstream's issue.
> >
> > If anyone involved with eudev, or is involved with the Gentoo Council
> > thinks that the previous paragraph is incorrect, they are flat out
> > wrong.
>
> I have yet to hear about a clear explanation why a seperate /usr is broken
> apart from the use of bluetooth keyboards. (Which are still in the
> minority when I check local shops/webstores)

Again, see above for specifics.

greg k-h