Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Flexibility and robustness in the Linux organisim

[Alan McKinnon]

On 29/09/2013 23:41, Dale wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 29/09/2013 18:33, Dale wrote:
>>>> that gnome is very hostile when it comes to KDE or choice is not news.
>>>>> And their dependency on systemd is just the usual madness. But they are
>>>>> not to blame for seperate /usr and the breakage it causes.
>>> If not, then what was it?  You seem to know what it was that started it
>>> so why not share?
>>>
>> He already said it. Someone added a hard disk to a PDP-9 (or was it an 11?)
>>
>> Literally. It all traces back to that. In those days there was no such
>> thing as volume management or raid. If you added a (seriously expensive)
>> disk the only feasible way to get it's storage in the system was to
>> mount it as a separate volume.
>>
>> >From that one single action this entire mess of separate /usr arose as
>> folks discovered more and more reasons to consider it good and keep it
>> around
>>
>
> That wasn't the question tho.  My question wasn't about many years ago
> but who made the change that broke support for a seperate /usr with no
> init thingy.  The change that happened in the past few years.
>
> I think I got my answer already tho.  Seems William Hubbs answered it
> but I plan to read his message again.  Different thread tho.



Nobody "broke" it.

It's the general idea that you can leave /usr unmounted until some
random arb time later in the startup sequence and just expect things to
work out fine that is broken.

It just happened to work OK for years because nothing happened to use
the code in /usr at that point in the sequence. More and more we are
seeing that this is no longer the case.

So no-one broke it with a specific commit. It has always been broken by
design becuase it's a damn stupid idea that just happened to work by
fluke. IT and computing is rife with this kind of error.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com