Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2013-08-13

[Alexis Ballier]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2013 19:36:14 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
[...]
> First, we will not have to worry any more about making sure all of the
> libraries needed by binaries in /{bin,sbin} are in /lib*. Also, we
> will not have to be concerned about programs on / trying to read data
> from /usr/share in early boot.

Why are those programs in / in the first place ? If they can't work
without /usr they are sort of useless in /.

[...]
> Because of this information, I propose that we vote not to
> require maintainers to support separate /usr configurations without an
> initramfs or some other early boot mechanism.

'not to require' leaves it up to the maintainers e.g. if they want to
call gen_usr_ldscript or install into /, right ? Or does that imply they
should not do it ?

The current requirement imposes some consistency, and lifting it would
leave us with some bastardized system where some random files are in /
and others in /usr.

I have no opinion whether separate usr should be supported or not: I
have not been using this layout since years. However, I strongly prefer
some kind of consistency: The traditional layout with a minimal / to
boot or the usr move both have their advantages; if we go for something
in between we get none of them.

I think most of what is in / currently is maintained by base-system@.
base-system@, or the council, could decide to provide a way to drop the
self-contained / properly. Say, you have to define a variable in
make.conf, let's call it GENTOO_USR_MOVE, and this variable would no-op
gen_usr_ldscript (they waste space if /usr is required anyway) and then
some packages could decide to install to /usr instead of / if this
variable is set, etc. Once this is ready, you can define this variable
in the profiles and get all the profit advertised by Fedora usr move.

Alexis.