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

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

Am 01.10.2013 01:21, schrieb Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike):
> El 30/09/13 00:47, Volker Armin Hemmann escribió:
>> Am 29.09.2013 18:41, schrieb Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike):
>>> El 29/09/13 18:03, Volker Armin Hemmann escribió:
>>>> Am 29.09.2013 17:12, schrieb Greg Woodbury:
>>>>> On 09/29/2013 07:58 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> things were broken way before that. As much as I hate systemd, it is not
>>>>>> the root cause of the problem.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The problems were caused by people saying that seperate /usr was a good
>>>>>> idea, so / would not fill up and similar idiocies. The problems were
>>>>>> caused by people saying that lvm is a good idea - for desktops. Those
>>>>>> people who are fighting against the kernel auto assembling raids are to
>>>>>> blame too.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Systemd is just another point in a very long list.
>>>>>>
>>>>> The usr filesystem was separate from root from the very early days of
>>>>> UNIX.  Disks were *tiny* (compared to today) and spreading certain
>>>>> things across separate spindles provided major benefits. Certainly,
>>>>> the original need to require a separate usr went away fairly quickly,
>>>>> but other benefits continued to encourage a seperation between root
>>>>> and usr.
>>>>>
>>>> in the very early days /usr did not exist in the first space and was
>>>> only created because someone added a harddisk.
>>>>
>>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>>> I'm going to show the lack of sense of this argument:
>>> in the very early days linux did not exist in the first space and was
>>> only created because someone got a 386.
>>>
>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>> wrong analogy and it goes down from here. Really.
> Ohh, but they are inspired on YOUR analogy, so guess how wrong yours was.

your trolling is weak. And since I never saw anything worth reading
posted by you, you are very close to plonk territory right now.

>>> in the very early days GNU did not exist in the first space and was
>>> only created because someone jammed a printer.
>>>
>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>>>
>>> in the very early days Gentoo did not exist in the first space and was
>>> only created because someone added a processor.
>>>
>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>>>
>>> in the very early days hardening did not exist in the first space and was
>>> only created because someone added security.
>>>
>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>>>
>>> in the very early days Gnome did not exist in the first space and was
>>> only created because someone got a graphics card.
>>>
>>> Not really a good reason to keep it around.
>>>
>>> I'm sure you'll be able to figure out the pattern there.
>>>
>>> Ohh and BTW, /usr was not just added because someone added a harddrive,
>>> in most cases it was used to allow machines contain a very small system
>>> on / which was enough to just boot and mount a networked system (/usr)
>>> containing most of the software. This allowed for cheaper deployment of
>>> machines since the hard drive could be smaller as it wouldn't need to
>>> have all the data locally. Yeah, if this sounds familiar is because this
>>> was later moved to initramfs.
>> no, network'ed file systems came a lot later.
>> Initially /usr was added because one harddisk was full. Really, that is
>> the whole reason for its (broken) existance.
> Please provide some reference about "Initially /usr was added because
> one harddisk was full." without it your statement is moot to me.

see Mark David Dumlao's mails.

But it is interesting, that you are attacking others with your superior
knowledge - and then show that you lack exactly that. You are talking
about stuff you have no clue at all about.

>
> The setup of a separate /usr on a networked system was used in amongst
> other places a few swedish universities.

seperate /usr on network has been used in a lot of places. So what? Does
that prove anything?
Nope, it doesn't.

>>>>> The var filesystem was for variable system data, and was never
>>>>> terribly big and its inclusion on the root volume happened.  The home
>>>>> filesystem  became traditionally separate because data expands to fill
>>>>> all availab;e space, and users collect *things*
>>>> and a seperate /home does not create any problems.
>>>> /var is much more prone to accidentally fill up then /usr ever was.
>>> You are jst getting it wrong, /var was kept locally as the data there
>>> was supposed to change from machine to machine.
>> no, you just don't understand what I wrote.
>> People told other people to keep /usr seperate so / may not fill up by
>> accident.
>>
>> That advise always was murky at best. Outright stupid is a good
>> description too.
>>
>> /usr is not prone to much changes. So if your / fits the contents of
>> /usr just fine, there is pretty much no risk.
>> /var on the other hand tends to explode - but a lot of people never got
>> told to put /var on a seperate disk.
>>
>> If you ever realized that a tens of gigabyte logfile just made your box
>> unbootable, you learnt a lot that day.
> That's why you move /var/log, not /var

then /var/portage
/var/package
/var/tmp
/var/spool
or
/var/lib

explodes in size and takes out your box.

Seriously, /var is a good candidate for a seperate partition. /usr is not.

>>>>> Networking made it possible to have home entirely off system, and
>>>>> diskless worstations ruled for a while as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> By the time Linux came along, it had become common for boot volumes to
>>>>> not be mounted during normal system operation, but the three
>>>>> filesystem layout was common and workable.  As Linux continued to be
>>>>> like Topsy (she jest growed!) fragmentation started to occur as
>>>>> "distributions" arose.  The "balkanization" of Linux distributions
>>>>> became a real concern to some and standardization offorts were
>>>>> encouraged.
>>>>>
>>>>> The "File System Standard" (FSS) was renamed to the Filesystem
>>>>> Hierarch Standard (FHS) and it was strongly based on the UNIX System V
>>>>> definitions (which called for seperation of usr and root.) POSIX added
>>>>> more layers and attempted to bring in the various BSD flavors.
>>>>>
>>>>> THe LSB (Linux Standards Base) effort was conceived as supersceeding
>>>>> all the other efforts, and FHS was folded into the LSB definition. Yet
>>>>> even then a separate root and usr distinction survived.  Then things
>>>>> started falling apart again - POSIX rose like a phoenix and even the
>>>>> Windows/wintel environment could claim POSIX compliant behavior. The
>>>>> fall of the LSB effort really became evident when the FHS was gutted
>>>>> and certain major players decided to ignore the LSB recommendations.
>>>> too bad POSIX is much older than LSB or FHS.
>>> Too bad separate /usr is much older than initramfs.
>> too bad that initramfs and initrd are pretty good solutions to the
>> problem of hidden breakage caused by seperate /usr.
>> If you are smart enough to setup an nfs server, I suppose you are smart
>> enough to run dracut/genkernel&co.
> If you are smart enough to run "dracut/genkernel&co" I suppose you are
> smart enough to see the wrongness of your initial statement "too bad
> POSIX is much older than LSB or FHS."

too bad I am right and you are and idiot.

Originally, the name "POSIX" referred to IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, released
in 1988. The family of POSIX standards is formally designated as IEEE
1003 and the international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945.
The standards, formerly known as IEEE-IX, emerged from a project that
began circa 1985. Richard Stallman suggested the name POSIX to the IEEE.
The committee found it more easily pronounceable and memorable, so it
adopted it

That is from wikipedia.

1985/1988. When were LSB/FHS created again?

FHS in 1994. Hm....


>>>>> As a result, the GNOME Alliance has shattered.  The main GNOME army
>>>>> marches on its unfathomable path, and various large chunks have broke
>>>>> off in their own directions (e.g. Cinnamon and Mate) seeking to remain
>>>>> flexible and not incompatible with the KDE and other lesser DE folks.
>>>>>
>>>>> It is truly layable at the feet of the GNOME folks, the breakage of
>>>>> the root and usr filesystem separability is all derived from the GNOME
>>>>> camp.
>>>>> These changes may not, in fact, be deliberate or intended to "defeat"
>>>>> Microsoft, but Ockham's Razor cuts and intentionality is the simpler
>>>>> explanation.
>>>> 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.
>>> True, fingers here should be pointed into another direction like systemd.
>> systemd is not the first package to break.
> udev is a part of systemd

so what?

>>>>> To come back to the thesis: robustness and flexibility are required
>>>>> for good "health" and we are witnessing a dangerous challenge.
>>>> what? that you need an initrd? That is so bad?
>>> It may be, there is people which may not have enough free space ob /boot
>>> for example.
>> and now we are deeply into kidding territory. How small is that boot? 3mb?
> Maybe, I know of Gentoo users running on really old Pentium IIs with
> SCSI disks, so it wouldn't come as a surprise.

I have really old scsi disks. 15k rpm U160/U320 ones. 37GB each. Way
then more enough room to store / with /usr in it. / in my system is a 64
gb disk.

Even P2 can stomach 80/120gb harddisks. You know the crap you get almost
for free on ebay.

And if you have a really small harddisk, seperating /boot is just stupid
anyway. So you have all of / to store your vmlinuz file and the
init'thingie'.

>>>> Are you kidding me?
>>> I doubt it, instead you seem to be just trolling, see your own arguments
>> well, I haven't seen any arguments from you so far. So who is the troll
>> again?
> You have kindly disregarded them... like trolls tend to do,

hm, lets see - I have facts on my side and you are insulting me. Who is
the troll again?

>>>>> [PS} If anybody cares, I was trained in both Computer Science and
>>>>> Biological Science.  and I can expand on the parallels if so desired.
>>>>>
>>>> no thank you. But if I might add one: you are making an elephant out of
>>>> a gnat.
>>> To me it looks like youu are making a gnat out of an elephant.
>> what is the elephant? Running an extra command on kernel updates?
> Requiring users to repartition systems with the downtime that carries,
> for example.
You don't need to repartition your system AT ALL. All you have to do is
to create an init 'thingie'. Genkernel can do that for you. You are done.

Seriously, you just convinced me. You ARE a mouth breather.

And I am not answering to your crap anymore. It my be contagious.

*plonk*