Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone switched to eudev yet?

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 08:39:41PM +0000, Neil Bothwick wrote
>
>> You are only considering the case of /usr being on a plain hard disk
>> partition, what if it in on an LVM volume, or encrypted (or both)
>> of mounted over the network? All of these require something to be
>> run before they can be mounted, and if that cannot be run until udev
>> has started, we have been painted into a corner.
>
>   I agree that there will always be a small number of corner-cases where
> an initr* is required.  What annoys me, and probably a lot of other
> people, is the-dog-in-the-manger attitude
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_in_the_Manger where some people
> seem to say "If my weirdo, corner-case system can't boot a separate /usr
> without an initr* then, by-golly, I'll see to it that *NOBODY* can boot
> a separate /usr without an initr*".

This is misleading in two ways.

1) You're talking as if having a functionally merged /usr and / system
(i.e., many programs needed by the sysad to fix a non-booting system
are in /usr, and programs in /usr will break if /usr is not in sync
with /) is a weirdo corner case. It is NOT. It is very likely how the
vast majority of Linux systems on the planet work. Separate /usr is
itself the weirdo corner case. It was in fact a weirdo corner case
since day 1.
2) You're talking as if Lennart or whoever is breaking into your
systems and actively preventing you from customizing it to boot a
separate /usr. If this is the case you _really_ need to change your
ssh keys, they wiped that vulnerability a couple years ago.

Nobody's preventing you from building a custom system that cleanly
separates / and /usr. But hey, don't pretend that even Gentoo does it
correctly. Besides the equery tests in this thread, I've never
personally confirmed that any other distro does - and Fedora cleanly
admits that they don't.