Re: [gentoo-dev] udev and /usr

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> wrote:
> Host-specific / and host-independent /usr is not itself a bad idea.  I can
> envision quite a few useful scenarios for this.  But on a single box, why?
> And for those of us with differing architectures, how would this add any
> benefit?  Is this more of a detail for future RHEL releases (since Fedora is
> a type of proving ground for RH) so that sysadmins have an easier time
> managing them?  Nothing wrong with it, but it needs to be a configurable
> choice by the end-user.
>
> I'll admit I may not be as informed as I oughta to be, but what I have read
> indicates that some people think this is the direction to go in, for various
> reasons.

See:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

That is some of the rationale for Fedora.  It isn't a bad idea both
for destop-oriented and server-oriented setups.  It especially makes
sense for a more traditional distro with versioned releases (basicaly
you just drop in a new /usr and you're done minus a few /etc updates -
and if you make /etc nothing but overrides from defaults then it would
itself be almost empty and not need updates much).

Sure, we're not really planning to do that with Gentoo, but that is
the pressure upstream is under.  When you have big distros pushing all
the major projects in a particular direction we need to be really
selective about where we push back.

The sky isn't falling though - nobody is looking to go out of their
way to break non-root /usr, and we are looking to have a minimal
initramfs even for those cases where it breaks a little.

Rich