Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 01:40:52
Message-Id: CAG2nJkM7oxouthJCDhD8iWiUHHL0AXFXW+n4iEk6tOKe-F9ZVw@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location by Daniel Campbell
1 On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Daniel Campbell <lists@××××××××.us> wrote:
2 > I'm not affected by anything regarding the /usr switch, but I'd like
3 > to have a good talk with the first person who decided a
4 > system-critical binary belonged in /usr instead of /bin or /sbin.
5 > They've created a mess for every distro and any project that depends
6 > on their work.
7
8 (sorry for the previous post, accidentally clicked somewhere onscreen)
9
10 As I've pointed out before:
11 1) "system-critical" is actually dependent on the system. A system dependent
12 on an smb share will find smbmount system critical. One dependent on
13 zfs-fuse will find fuse system critical. With the advent of fuse,
14 some filesystem
15 that depends on an arbitrary user program will find that system-critical.
16 While this works for for 99.(99?)% of user systems out there, FHS
17 is supposed
18 to be targetting all of them, and so it fails in principle in that respect.
19 I remember making a lengthy thread on this mailing list challenging how FHS
20 defined this and it appeared that nobody could make a defense.
21 2) the reality is, it's not just binaries even. There are some things
22 that binaries
23 depend on, that in theory should be in /. For example, the hwid database, or
24 libraries. Libraries make for a complex problem, because /usr is supposed to
25 be network-sharable. Any libraries your programs depend on can't simply just
26 be pushed to /, because then there'd be the chance that the
27 programs and their
28 libraries were not in sync.
29
30 I made a handful of criticisms to FHS in that thread before, and nobody was
31 able to mount a suitable defense. The point being, even in principle, separating
32 / and /usr is flaky design at best. That we just so happened to
33 accumulate a number
34 of packages that are historically installed to /usr is a consequence
35 of that. It's not
36 even necessarily the fault of the upstream developer, who's not
37 supposed to care so
38 much which PREFIX they install to, or the distro packager, who can't yet predict
39 how the user will tailor their system.
40
41 If you were in the shoes of the ebuild packagers, you would be hard-pressed to
42 predict which packages belong in the / PREFIX and which ones in /usr PREFIX,
43 100 times out of 100. But you need 100 times out of 100 or you'll get
44 people whining
45 that they can't boot or whining that they need to do some migration. That's
46 why / and /usr separation is broken.
47 --
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Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location Daniel Campbell <lists@××××××××.us>