Re: [gentoo-dev] supporting /usr on separate partition

[Zac Medico]

On 10/16/2011 05:52 AM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
> On 15/10/11 06:07 PM, Zac Medico wrote:
>> On 10/15/2011 01:57 AM, Wulf C. Krueger wrote:
>>> On 15.10.2011 10:42, Michael Schreckenbauer wrote:
>>>> in what way will exherbo deal wih this mess? Are there any plans?
>>>
>>> We don't support /usr on a separate partition. People can, of course, do
>>> that and I'll point them to dracut for creating an initramfs.
>>>
>>> Or they can do whatever works for them. People using Exherbo are
>>> expected to be able to deal with such stuff.
>>
>> I don't think it's a good idea for Gentoo to encourage users to have
>> /usr on a separate partition. We should probably remove the separate
>> /usr partition from "Code Listing 2.1: Filesystem usage example" in our
>> handbook:
>>
>> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap2_pre1
>>
>
> For desktops i've never seen much purpose of having /usr on its own
> partition (or more than the usual 3 of /boot,/,swap tbh), but for
> servers I have seen a lot of configurations over the years that put /usr
> on its own partition.  Exherbo aside, I would expect that Gentoo would
> (continue to?) support doing this.

Well, you'll have to define the meaning of "support" in this context. I
simply said that it shouldn't be encouraged, with me reason being that
it tends to add unnecessary complexity (in violation of the KISS
principle [1]).

> As per the documentation itself, Code Listing 2.1 is i believe an
> example of what is possible, not what we are encouraging users to do.
> That doc seems pretty clear that the default is partitioning scheme is
> the default /boot,/,swap ...

Why should our main installation docs mention a configuration that the
vast majority of our users (all?) would be better off without?

> And just to confirm, doesn't udev's installation (which is primarily in
> /lib) support /usr on a separate partition now, without an initramfs?

What's the benefit of having /usr on a separate partition anyway? The
only somewhat reasonable explanation that I've heard is so that it can
be mounted readonly. If people want that, I think it's perfectly
reasonable to expect them to use either an initramfs or a simple linuxrc
approach [2] to ensure that /usr is mounted before init starts. For
complex configurations like this, we can have a separate page of docs,
like the raid+lvm2 page [3], and link it from the main installation docs
if we want.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
[2]
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_20749880f5bc5feda141488498729fe8.xml
[3] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml
-- 
Thanks,
Zac