Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] InitRAMFS - boot expert sought
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:45:42
Message-Id: 20120329154318.365cc586@hactar.digimed.co.uk
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] InitRAMFS - boot expert sought by Michael Mol
1 On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:21:15 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
2
3 > > That, IMO, is the problem with the current filesystem layout. The
4 > > split between / and /usr is anything but well-defined. Putting things
5 > > in different boxes based on their function is good practice. Doing it
6 > > based on some arbitrary size limit on the box is not.
7 >
8 > Except that's not what people are doing. According to what I've read,
9 > that was the original rationale a couple decades ago, but that hasn't
10 > been the driving case for it for a long time, and pointing to it in a
11 > modern context is silly.
12
13 No, that's not the reason for doing it now. The reason for doing it now
14 has been applied to the previous solution (generally a bad idea) and is
15 aimed at making / a self-contained bootable system, which is a movable
16 target as hardware evolves.
17
18 > These days, you put things on different mount
19 > points because you want different underlying characteristics either in
20 > the filesystem or its underlying block device.
21
22 And for the vast majority of use cases, separating /bin and /usr/bin does
23 not make much sense.
24
25 > The gripe about the filesystem layout strikes me as a "it works, but
26 > it isn't clean or elegant" complaint. That means changing it is change
27 > for change's sake. And we're going to experience these growing pains
28 > tenfold as the consequences of that play out.
29
30 It's never been clean or elegant, but it was tolerated and worked around.
31 Now those that are trying to work around it have said they are no longer
32 going to do so, which is their choice. If the separate /usr had been
33 allowed to die when 20MB hard disks were around, this whole situation
34 would never have arisen.
35
36 The trouble with shit hitting the fan is that the longer you wait the
37 more there is to spread around :(
38
39
40 --
41 Neil Bothwick
42
43 Oxymoron: Clearly Misunderstood.

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Re: [gentoo-user] InitRAMFS - boot expert sought Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com>