Re: [gentoo-user] Re: After /usr conflation: why not copy booting software to /sbin rather than initramfs?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:35:44 +0000
Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de> wrote:

> Hi, Alan.
>
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:48:19PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:24:22 +0000
> > Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de> wrote:
>
> > > That is precisely what the question was NOT about.  The idea was
> > > to copy (not move) booting software to /sbin instead of an
> > > initramfs - the exact same programs, modulo noise - to have the
> > > SW in /sbin necessary to mount /usr.
>
> > Two words:
>
> > shared libraries
>
> > Copying binaries is not enough. You have to find and copy every
> > shared library those binaries use. Plus all the data and other
> > files they might need.
>
> > This is non-trivial.
>
> <silently screams>.  It's equally non-trivial for initramfs, yet
> nobody seems to be raising this objection for that.
>
> Why is nobody else on this thread willing to take up its main point,
> the exact equivalence between the known, ugly, initramfs solution and
> the as yet half-baked idea of putting the same binaries into /sbin?


Read my other mail and pay attention to the difference between
transient and persistent.

initramfs is an elegant engineering solution (albeit over-engineered
for our specific case of being Gentoo users).

Your questions are about an extremely ill-advised action that has no
sound basis. It copies stuff around to make one very specific thing
work but with zero consideration for what it will do to everything
else. That is bad, bad engineering.

If you want all this stuff in /, then do it correctly and modify the
ebuilds to put the originals there (and troubleshoot the fallout from
other faulty hard-coded stuffs). This is a lot of work, but it is sound.



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