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On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 08:21:41PM +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote: |
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> In two weeks from now, the council will meet again. This is the time |
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> to raise and prepare items that the council should put on the agenda to |
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> vote on. |
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> |
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> Please respond to this email with agenda items. Please do not hestitate |
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> to repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you previously |
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> suggested one (since the last meeting). |
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Council members, |
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I am very concerned about your vote last meeting with regard to separate |
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/usr being supported. Whether or not it will be supported is not a valid |
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question, because it will be. |
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There is now division in the community about your vote, so I am formally |
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requesting a clarification. |
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I can assure the council that we are not going to try to stabilize newer |
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versions of udev out of hand. We have a tracker bug open which will show |
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all of the tasks we need to complete before that happens [1]. |
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Once that happens, I want to start looking into the /usr merge (see |
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below). |
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I think the more appropriate question is, do we want to continue |
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attempting to support /usr as a separate partition without an initramfs? |
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This affects much more than udev. There is another event happening in |
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the linux community which is referred to as the /usr merge [2]. I know |
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this is happening on Fedora. I believe archlinux is looking into doing |
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this, and Debian is as well. |
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One advantage gentoo, as a distro, would have if we do the /usr merge is |
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that we can get rid of gen_usr_ldscript. This was put in place as a |
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workaround [3], and we would be able to remove it. |
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Any distribution which does the /usr merge will not be able to support /usr |
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as a separate partition without an initramfs, and I think it is just a |
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matter of time until packages don't check /{sbin,bin,lib*} any longer. |
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We did have a pretty extensive discussion on the dev mailing list |
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regarding the /usr merge, and my feeling from the community was that we |
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should do this [4]. |
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In summary, I feel that if we continue supporting separate /usr without |
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an initramfs, we will be harming our distro in the long run, so I would |
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ask you to please carefully consider this before you vote. |
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Thanks much, |
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William |
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[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411627 |
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[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge |
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[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4411 |
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[4] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_c3c5bdabbe058b08627ff04cee896af3.xml |
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