Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr

[Zac Medico]

On 01/04/2012 09:32 AM, Olivier Crête wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-01-04 at 18:12 +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, Michał Górny wrote:
>>
>>>> What mistakes?
>>
>>> The mistake of introducing a pointless separation based on a rule of
>>> thumb which becomes more and more blurry over time, and hacking
>>> packages just to make it work.
>>
>> There's really nothing pointless or blurry about this separation.
>> The FHS has a nice definition: "The contents of the root filesystem
>> must be adequate to boot, restore, recover, and/or repair the system."
>
> The problem is that to boot a modern system, you need a shitload of
> stuff. For example, modern network filesystems often have secure
> authentication and probably LDAP too, so that means we need to move ldap
> and openssl into / and all the dependencies. Also, anything that
> installs a udev rule needs to be in /, and the list goes on an on. Very
> soon, you have almost everything in /...
>
> This rule made sense in the 80s, but it doesn't match the modern world
> anymore.
>
> Some longer explanations:
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

The FHS notion of "root filesystem as a recovery partition" existed long
before the relatively modern development of things like busybox and
initramfs made it more practical to use an initramfs as a recovery
partition. Anyone who wouldn't prefer to use an initramfs for their
"recover partition" probably just doesn't realize how well suited an
initramfs is for the job. It's so well suited for the job that it makes
the old FHS notion of "root filesystem as a recovery partition" seem quaint.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac