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

[Richard Yao]

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.
>
> Rich
>

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.

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?