Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 11 November 2012, 19:00 UTC

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:32 AM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> That has been done already by toolchain a while back. Take a look at the
> code in toolchain-funcs.eclass. There are very few platforms where this
> function does anything at all these days. It would just be a matter of
> removing linux from the platforms it supports.

My concern isn't that the code won't do what you're expecting it to.
I have every confidence that the files will move to exactly where you
want them to go.

My concern is all the downstream effects after that.  Does anything
hard-code a path in /?  Do any config files in /etc reference those
paths, maybe for plugins/etc?  What about linking - will we have any
issues if core system binaries are linked to paths in /?

>  Since applying the patch itself will not force any rebuilds, it should
>  just end up being a natural migration; as things are rebuilt the
>  libraries will move from /lib to /usr/lib with no harm being done.

Except to anything that depends on those libraries being in /lib.
Maybe that is nothing, but until you test the migration you don't
know.

Testing doesn't mean changing the eclass, installing bzip2, and noting
that the library moves to /usr.  It means then testing anything that
depends on bzip2 and making sure that they weren't broken as a result.

Oh, and if everything doesn't move overnight then packages could
migrate in almost any order, which means you have to look out for
potential race conditions.

I would hope that the main issue is going to be linking and perhaps
@preserved-libs would help with that if it ever becomes stable.
However, when moving so many libraries you need to think carefully
about testing.  How many things depend on zlib or ncurses or libcap or
pam or libpcre?

Rich