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

[Dale]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:58:15 -0600
> Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>
>> So, Nuno, everything was fine until they started moving things to a
>> place where it shouldn't be.
> No Dale, that is just flat out wrong.
>
> There is no such thing as "place where stuff should be". There are only
> conventions, and like all conventions, rituals, fashions and traditions
> these are prone to breakage when things move on. Things move on because
> they become way more complex than the designer of the convention thought
> they would (or could).
>
> The truth is simply this (derived from empirical observation):
>
> Long ago we had established conventions about / and /usr; mostly
> because the few sysadmins around agreed on some things. In those days
> there was no concept of a packager or maintainer, there was only a
> sysadmin. This person was a lot like me - he decided and if you didn't
> like it that was tough. So things stayed as they were for a very long
> time.
>
> Thankfully, it is not like that anymore and the distinction between
> / and /usr is now so blurry there might as well not be a distinction.
> Which is good as the distinction wasn't exactly a good thing from day
> 1 either - it was useful for terminal servers (only by convention) and
> let the sysadmin keep his treasured uptime (which only proves he isn't
> doing kernel maintenance...)
>
> I'm sorry you bought into the crap about / and /usr that people of my
> ilk foisted on you, but the time for that is past, and things move on.
> If there is to be a convention, there can be only one that makes any
> sense:
>
> / and /usr are essentially the same, so put your stuff anywhere you
> want it to be. ironically this no gives you the ultimate in choice, not
> the false one you had for years. So if your /usr is say 8G, then
> enlarge / bu that amount, move /usr over and retain all your mount
> points as the were. Now for the foreseeable future anything you might
> want to hotplug at launch time stands a very good chance of working as
> expected.
>
> You will only need an initrd if you have / on striped RAID or LVM or
> similar, but that is a boot strap problem not a /usr problem (and you
> do not have such a setup). Right now you need an initrd anyway to boot
> such setups.
>
> The design of separate / and /usr on modern machines IS broken by
> design. It is fragile and causes problems in the large case. This
> doesn't mean YOUR system is broken and won't boot, it means it causes
> unnecessary hassle in the whole ecosystem, and the fix is to change
> behaviour and layout to something more appropriate to what we have
> today.
>

The problems with that is these:  It worked ALL these years, why should
it not now?  I have / on a traditional partition which is not going to
resize easily.  If I put / on LVM, I need a init thingy.  I don't want a
init thingy or I would have put / on LVM too.  I made / large enough
that I would not fill it up in the lifetime of this system but not large
enough to absorb /usr.  If I am going to have to redo all my partitions
yet again, I will not use LVM.  I use LVM to eliminate this EXACT
problem.  I got tired of running out of space and having to move stuff
around all the time. 

So, worked for ages, then it breaks when people change where they put
things.  Answer is, don't change where you put things.  Then things
still work for most everyone, including me.  I'm not a programmer nor am
I a rocket scientist but even I can see that.  If I can see it, I have
no idea why a programmer can't other than being willingly blinded.  ;-) 

Udev/systemd seems to be the problem.  How do I come to that conclusion,
eudev people says they will support separate /usr with no init thingy. 
Either the eudev folks are rocket scientist type programmers and the
udev/systemd people are playing with fire crackers or there is a way for
this to work with udev/systemd to, IF they wanted it to work.  Thing is,
they have some grand scheme to force people to their way of doing
things, which includes a init thingy.  Since there is a way to continue
with the old way, which has worked for decades, guess what I am going to
do?  Yep, I'm going to jump off the udev ship and onto the eudev ship. 
The eudev ship may be old and traditional but it works like I expect. 
Now if others want to stay on the current ship, works for me too.  I'm
just not liking the meals served on the udev ship anymore. 

I might add, one of the reasons I left Mandriva was because of the init
thingy that kept giving me grief.  If I have to use that thing on
Gentoo, the first time it breaks, I'm going to a binary install.  If I
am going to put up with that mess, I may as well have something that
installs quickly.  That was one thing I liked about Mandriva, install
was really easy.  It still is.  Ubuntu is too.  Actually, they look a
lot alike to me. 

Everyone can have their opinion but I also have mine.  This worked fine
for ages until udev/systemd came along.  That's my opinion and I don't
think I am alone on that.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

-- 
I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!