Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Neil.

On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 11:37:50PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 21:09:38 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > > It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction,
> > > now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer
> > > devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an
> > > edge case.

> > That's precisely the sort of patronising comment I was complaining of in
> > my previous paragraph.

> In what way is it patronising?

It talks down to people.  It insinuates that the readers don't have the
wherewithal to appreciate that they have been deliberately hurt by
_somebody_ rather than something "just happening"; that the idea of an
abstraction "moving" is any sort of justification for anything.

> > It isn't "evolution".  It has been a decision of somebody to move it.
> > Who?

> It hasn't been a single decision.

Somebody, somewhere was the first person to decide to put early boot
software into /usr.  Others may have followed him, sooner or later, but
there was a single person (or perhaps a conspiracy) that did this first.
Who?  There was no public discussion of this momentous change, not that
I'm aware of.  Why?

> > > > No, this breaking of separate /usr was done by some specific
> > > > project, some specific person, even, in a supreme display of
> > > > incompetence, malice, or arrogance.  How come this project and
> > > > this person have managed to maintain such a low profile?  There
> > > > seems to have been some sort of conspiracy to do this breakage in
> > > > secret, each member of the coven pushing the plot until the
> > > > damage was irrevocable.  Who was it?

> > > So which was it, one specific person or a coven of conspirators?
> > > This is open source, secret conspiracies don't really work well. If
> > > this really was such a bad move, do you really think the likes of
> > > Greg K-H would not have stepped in? Or is he a conspirator too?

> > I know not how many people were involved.  Don't you think it
> > noteworthy that we on this group first learnt of the change when it
> > had already happened?  I have no idea whether people like GK-H would
> > have been aware of it either.

> I think that is entirely the right time to learn of it. If you want to
> know about the devs' discussions before reaching the decision, you
> should read gentoo-dev. Until then it was a dev issue, now it is being
> implemented it is a user issue.

Please be aware the change I was talking about was the decision to break
separate /usr, not the Gentoo devs' reaction to this breakage.  Why did
we only become aware of the decision to break separate /usr after it was
too late to do anything about it?  How could such a thing happen, if not
through conspiracy?

> > It [creating an initramfs] may or may not be demanding for any
> > particular administrator.  It is undoubtedly tedious and time
> > consuming.

> I disagree, but then I have actually tried doing it.

I tried, and gave up after a couple of hours.  It was a challenge, but
I've grown out of being fascinated by challenges for their own sake.
Then I installed dracut, only to find it won't work on my system.  I
haven't tried genkernel.  In the end, with regrets, I took /usr out of my
LVM area and put it into a new partition which became the root partition.  

> This whole discussion reminds me of a conversation I had with a senior
> SUSE engineer earlier this year, someone of a similar age to myself.
> His comment was along the lines of "I remember when Linux users wanted
> the latest bleeding edge, now they complain every time something
> changes".

The particular change is not progress, it's not a new feature, it's not
something useful for users.  It's pure breakage for no good reason.  If
this is what "bleeding edge" now means, no surprise that people complain
about it.

> --
> Neil Bothwick

> A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance from Mom.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).