Re: [gentoo-dev] [PATCH] use.desc: add global USE flag 'split-sbin'

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2019-10-16 at 12:03 +0200, Jaco Kroon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> -- large trim --
> > > For what it's worth.  All of my systems are installed with a fixed-
> > > size
> > > 512MB / with everything else (including /usr) on separate LVs.
> > >
> > > Whilst sbin vs bin is just a matter of what's available, to me it
> > > makes
> > > sense to keep these split.  To me it's always been logical to keep
> > > administrative type (root) tools under sbin, and stuff that's
> > > generally
> > > useful for users under bin.
> > >
> > > Keeping / and /usr split (or the ability to keep it split) is rather
> > > crucial for me.  It's for historic installations a matter of space
> > > constraints on /.  For new installations it's a matter of keeping /
> > > as
> > > small as possible in order to have a smallish bootable system which
> > > can
> > > be used for recovering the rest of the system, ideally without an
> > > initrd
> > > (which also works to an extent).
> > >
> > > Kind Regards,
> > > Jaco
> > >
> > For the umpteenth time time: nothing will change. You can keep your
> > (albeit broken) separate / and /usr partitions. *NOTHING* will change
> > for anyone. There are no plans to change the defaults. This is *MERELY*
> > about giving people the chance to opt in to the /usr-merge.
> Thanks for the confirmation.  As long as it's an OPTION I'm happy.  And
> no, other than on my desktop machine a split /usr is working very well,
> and even in that case a split off /lib/firmware actually caused me much,
> much more problems (for i915 and amdgpu firmware) than a split /usr.
> Unfortunately /lib/firmware grew over the years and so I had no choice
> other than to split it off after the fact.
> > That said, the idea of using / as a "recovery" filesystem in general is
> > broken:
> > https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
> > And no, this is not systemd breaking your system, or Lennart, it's
> > distros and userlands not being careful to have things in / never
> > depend on things in /usr.
>
> It's saved my butt more than once when the (extremely) limited tools in
> the initrds on those same systems failed to do so.  Mostly these cases
> weren't Gentoo.  Yes RHEL, I'm looking at you.  Gentoo I generally
> recover crazy faults without the use of system rescue CDs (probably
> required it 10 times over 15 years).  Can't say the same for those
> distro's pushing for "recovery systems in initrd", and I'm running
> probably 3x more Gentoo systems than all other distro's combined.
>
> The only stuff so far I really wished worked without /usr was editors
> such as vim and/or nano (sed sufficed in those cases).
>
> Would contributing a script that's able to check which binaries in /bin
> (and /sbin) depend on libs not also on / be useful here?  Perhaps as a
> QA check somehow?
>

I've been doing that for quite some time, and the usual answer was 'I
don't care, use initramfs, but I WON'T move files correctly to /usr'.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny