Re: [gentoo-user] Optional /usr merge in Gentoo

[Alan McKinnon]

On 18/08/2013 08:40, Stroller wrote:
>
> On 17 August 2013, at 12:49, Dan Johansson wrote:
>> ...
>>>>> The usr-merge will be a slow, gradual change; it will probably take
>>>>> years. The systemd package entered the tree in June 2011, after more
>>>>> than a year in an overlay, and then it took more than two years to
>>>>> make it an official alternative to OpenRC. The /usr merge will take a
>>>>> similar amount of time, if not longer.
>>>>>
>>
>> And when we are at it, why not rename '/' to 'C:\' ?
>
> Well, seriously, why not?
>
> You haven't made any arguments against putting everything on a single partition, just made a cheap "lolz, micro$oft windoze" analogy.
>
> I can understand wanting to put /home on a separate partition or /var/spool/mail or /var/www/sites but I don't understand this obsession with several different partitions for system files which are always going to be managed by portage and which I'm never going to move or mess with manually.
>
> Having /usr on a separate partition dates back to an era in which 10MB and 40MB harddisks were prohibitively expensive - they cost $1000s.
>
> Now we can host a complete Gentoo system on a $5 or $10 SDcard, I'm struggling to see the value.

I agree.

You've read that post to an embedded list that lays out clearly why this
/usr thing happened, right? I see computer files falling in two large
categories - the system and data. Portage manages the system, I only
need to ensure there's enough space. The data is mine and I may well
have very different needs for different parts - the fs settings for the
portage tree definitely don't work well for my media store with 4G
BluRay rips!

While we're on the topic, what's the obsession with having different
bits of the file hierarchy as different *mount points*? That harks back
to the days when the only way to have a chunk of fs space be different
was to have it as a separate physical thing and mount it. Nowadays we
have something better - ZFS. To me this makes so much more sense. I have
a large amount of storage called a pool, and set size limits and
characteristics for various directories without having to deal with
fixed size volumes.

There's LVM of course which makes things far easier than not having LVM,
but by $DEITY, it forces me to think of my storage in terms of 4
distinctly different layers = far too complex (even though the clever
design appeals to my inner nerd).

I can think of only one modern use case where a separate /usr is
desirable - as a read-only NFS mount for terminal servers. But that is
already a large complex setup, very stable and not changing much,
usually with an admin, so a boot environment with an initramfs shouldn't
be any real burden at all.


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