Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items -- Council meeting 2012-05-08

[Markos Chandras]

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On 04/24/2012 08:56 PM, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 08:21:41PM +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> In two weeks from now, the council will meet again.  This is the
>> time to raise and prepare items that the council should put on
>> the agenda to vote on.
>>
>> Please respond to this email with agenda items.  Please do not
>> hestitate to repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you
>> previously suggested one (since the last meeting).
>
> Council members,
>
> I am very concerned about your vote last meeting with regard to
> separate /usr being supported. Whether or not it will be supported
> is not a valid question, because it will be.
>
> There is now division in the community about your vote, so I am
> formally requesting a clarification.
>
> I can assure the council that we are not going to try to stabilize
> newer versions of udev out of hand. We have a tracker bug open
> which will show all of the tasks we need to complete before that
> happens [1].
>
> Once that happens, I want to start looking into the /usr merge
> (see below).
>
> I think the more appropriate question is, do we want to continue
> attempting to support /usr as a separate partition without an
> initramfs?
>
> This affects much more than udev. There is another event happening
> in the linux community which is referred to as the /usr merge [2].
> I know this is happening on Fedora. I believe archlinux is looking
> into doing this, and Debian is as well.
>
> One advantage gentoo, as a distro, would have if we do the /usr
> merge is that we can get rid of gen_usr_ldscript. This was put in
> place as a workaround [3], and we would be able to remove it.
>
> Any distribution which does the /usr merge will not be able to
> support /usr as a separate partition without an initramfs, and I
> think it is just a matter of time until packages don't check
> /{sbin,bin,lib*} any longer.
>
> We did have a pretty extensive discussion on the dev mailing list
> regarding the /usr merge, and my feeling from the community was
> that we should do this [4].
>
> In summary, I feel that if we continue supporting separate /usr
> without an initramfs, we will be harming our distro in the long
> run, so I would ask you to please carefully consider this before
> you vote.
>
> Thanks much,
>
> William
>
> [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411627 [2]
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge
>
>
[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4411
> [4]
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_c3c5bdabbe058b08627ff04cee896af3.xml

I
>
was very confused the first time this topic was brought to the
Council. I still believe this is not something we (Council) should
decide but rather the udev maintainers should decide themselves. In
any case, I am fine with bringing this issue back to Council as it
seems there is a general confusion in the Gentoo community about this.

- -- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2
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