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

[Daniel Campbell]

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On 09/28/2013 09:04 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 28/09/2013 13:32, Tanstaafl wrote:
>> On 2013-09-27 7:10 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
>> wrote:
>>> No really,*why exactly*?
>>
>> Because that was the RECOMMENDED WAY IN THE GENTOO HANDBOOK when
>> I first set this system up many years ago.
>
> This was something almost all of us recommended way back then. Lord
> only knows why we recommeded that. Maybe it was small drives (which
> didn't have), maybe it was different mount options (which I never
> did and never saw anyone else do either), or maybe it was for thin
> clients (which I only ever saw in use once - Shuttleworth labs in
> University of Cape Town).
>
> So why did we all (and I included myself) recommend this so much?
> Dude, I have no idea, but I *think* we were cargo-culting more than
> any other single factor.
>
>
>> I have no philosophical reason reason to stick with it, only a
>> (maybe irrational) fear of breaking things if I attempt to merge
>> it back into /.
>>
>> This, combined with an intense (also maybe irrational) desire to
>> avoid like the plague using an initramfs, is why this decision to
>> FORCE me into a position of possibly having to break my system
>> (either by a filed attempt at merging /usr into /, or a failed
>> attampt at using an initramfs).
>
> No-one is forcing you to do anything, the news item did not say
> that.
>
> It says that if you do it, the devs will not support you and you
> are on your own. It also says that in the dev's opinion, the day
> when you can no longer support it either is probably not too far
> away
>
>> I too sincerely hope eudev bypasses this issue.
>
> This has nothing to do with eudev, not with udev
>
>> The main thing about this that pisses me off is the lack of
>> enough warning... one month? Really? One month to compleyelt
>> rebuild a seerver that has been running flawlessly for many
>> years, just because someone doesn't like something that has been
>> done for many years?
>
>
> First, it is not one month, it is much longer. We've all been
> whinging about the issue for most of this year. Two, why do you
> think you need to rebuild the entire machine? You don't need to do
> that just to merge two filesystems.
>
> To merge two filesystems, you just merge two filesystems. You
> don't rebuild anything. You might have some downtime though
>
> Please see the news item for what it actually is, not something
> else.
>
>

Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate
/usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat
interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I
imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the
files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended
instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's
not adjacent to /'s partition?

I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple
system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home.
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