Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Let's redesign the entire filesystem!

[Richard Yao]

On 03/14/12 18:49, Greg KH wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 06:39:05PM -0400, Richard Yao wrote:
>> With that said, I have a few questions:
>>
>> 1. Why does no one mention the enterprise use case at all?
>
> It has been pointed out before, why constantly repeat ourselves.

Simple. No one has documented it. A webpage that makes a few vague
references to "enterprise use" does not count as documentation.

I happened to figure it out when trying to rationalize why anyone would
want this, but this is hardly obvious to those that imagine a computer
as a self-sufficient single disk system.

>> 2. Why not make rootfs a NFS mount with a unionfs at the SAN/NAS device?
>
> unionfs is still a "work in progress", some systems can't do that yet.

That sounds like something that needs to be fixed.

>> 3. Why not let the users choose where these directories go and support
>> both locations?
>
> Because a plethera of options is a sure way to make sure that half of
> them don't work over the long run.
>
> We aren't Debian here people, we don't support "everything" :)

Gentoo provides far more options than Debian does, so this seems
somewhat contradictory to me.


> If you want to support both, great, feel free to step up and do the
> work.

Fair enough, however, I should remind you that not much will happen
without a decision from the Gentoo Council. I am willing to accept
whatever decision they make, but I think that exposing this decision to
users is something that is within our ability to do.

Portage provides use with the ability to do abstractions that other
distributions cannot do, such as permitting people to merge
/usr{bin,lib{32,64,},sbin} into /.