Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: converting /etc/mtab to a symlink

[William Hubbs]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:46:38AM -0400, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 10/14/2013 10:11 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Richard Yao <ryao@g.o> wrote:
> >> The Linux kernel also supports far more architectures than we do. That does not mean that we must support them too.
> >>
> >> With that said, how does changing things benefit/affect users, especially non-systemd users?
> >
> > Better support for namespaces, for one.
> >
> > If this is actually going to actually break something, by all means
> > speak up.  Otherwise this really comes across as the whole
> > I-DONT-LIKE-CHANGE argument.  I get it.  By all means don't make your
> > /etc/mtab a symlink, and if down the road something doesn't work as a
> > result feel free to fork it unless you can convince somebody else to
> > make it work.  So far the only concrete issues that have been raised
> > seem minor - pertaining to NFS and PAM (both having solutions
> > available).
> >
> > If this causes trouble for the FreeBSD folks I'm interested in what
> > kinds of compromises can be reached.  I think a challenge is that
> > Linux and FreeBSD seem to be very slowly diverging - for software that
> > lives near the kernel/userspace boundary that could make things
> > interesting.  There doesn't seem to be much desire to limit Linux
> > distros to purely POSIX behavior.

As I said earlier in the thread, the planned baselayout change will only
affect Linux.

> My main concern is that some of the configure flags being proposed could
> make packages that worked on Gentoo FreeBSD stop working there. I am not
> making changes, but I think that there should be some benefit and that
> care should be taken not to break things for everyone else.

Richard, the packages we are discussing (nilfs-utils and nfs-utils)
are linux-specific, so there is nothing to worry about on the *bsd side
for them.

> That being said, mgorny said that this adds support for mount
> namespaces, but I have yet to hear an explanation of what that actually
> means. What are the use cases?

There has been a lot written on this; you might want to google
"per-process namespaces".

William