Re: [gentoo-dev] busybox[sep-usr] support for mounting /usr w/out hassle

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 4:05 AM, Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon
<chainsaw@g.o> wrote:
> Binaries that are essential for system boot, and must be available in
> single user mode go in /bin and /sbin, with their libraries in /lib.
> This allows for /usr to be:
> 1) marked read-only for NFS mounts, which some of us rely on
> 2) inside of an LVM2 container, allowing for / to be (very) small
> 3) on a squashfs filesystem, in order to save space

These are all things easily supported with an initramfs.  In fact,
initramfs-based solutions allow the same sorts of things to be done
with all the other filesystems and not just /usr.

> Trying to second-guess my motivation, and trying to undo unanimous
> council votes simply because your opinion is different, really has to
> stop.

I don't think anybody is trying to undo council votes - people are
just speculating as to what they voted on.  The easiest solution is
for somebody to say "I'm John Smith, and I am speaking officially for
the council, and we agree that what was decided upon is X."

It seems pretty clear that everybody wants to support a separate /usr.
 We even have multiple supported solutions, including an initramfs, a
use flag on busybox, and I believe somebody posted a script that can
be run during early boot to mount /usr.  It sounds like the only thing
that isn't supported is "doing nothing" - but with Gentoo if you "do
nothing" you don't get an installed system that works on any
configuration.

>
> I feel a lot better about vapier's pragmatic approach then I do about
> udev/systemd upstream's ability and motivation to support current
> systems. If you had any doubts about whether udev was part of the
> problem, consider what tarball you will have to extract it from in future.

Well, if others feel differently about the direction udev is taking,
they can of course just fork it.

I can't say I'm terribly excited about the amount of vertical
integration going on.  I don't run Gnome, and I don't run Unity.  I
really do prefer the unix way.

However, I don't contribute much to those upstream projects, and I
don't see much value in telling a bunch of people who do that they are
doing it wrong.  I don't like how Google develops Android in the dark,
or that they bundle 1GB of third-party stuff in their Chromium source
and distribute a favored binary-only derivative.  However, I do like
that they're giving me all of that stuff essentially for free, and so
beyond the odd blog post I try not to give them too hard a time.

In the same way I think we need to give the maintainers of these
projects in Gentoo some slack, or join those projects and help them to
address your needs.  It is a lot easier to tell others what to do than
to help make it happen, but a volunteer-based project like Gentoo
needs the latter more than the former.

Rich