Re: [gentoo-user] InitRAMFS - boot expert sought

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:02 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:21:11 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>
>> There is so much BS being spewed around this topic, I'm genuinely
>> disgusted. It's enough to lead me to suspect that Linux, as a
>> platform, is *dying*.
>
> It's not dying, it's evolving - with the associated growing pains. Of
> course, that's not to say it couldn't evolve the way of the dodo.

The problem is the lack of engineering sense.

>
>> The "true UNIX way" is about KISS philosophy. Keep it Simple, Stupid.
>> Keep things small, well-defined and modular. Break things into
>> components, keep the components small and relatively well-defined.
>
> That, IMO, is the problem with the current filesystem layout. The split
> between / and /usr is anything but well-defined. Putting things in
> different boxes based on their function is good practice. Doing it based
> on some arbitrary size limit on the box is not.

Except that's not what people are doing. According to what I've read,
that was the original rationale a couple decades ago, but that hasn't
been the driving case for it for a long time, and pointing to it in a
modern context is silly. These days, you put things on different mount
points because you want different underlying characteristics either in
the filesystem or its underlying block device.

The gripe about the filesystem layout strikes me as a "it works, but
it isn't clean or elegant" complaint. That means changing it is change
for change's sake. And we're going to experience these growing pains
tenfold as the consequences of that play out. If I was comfortable
with *any* other platform as much as I've been with Gentoo these past
couple years, I'd be jumping ship immediately.

>
> It makes me think of Ubuntu's insistence on fitting their installer on a
> single CD, even if it means omitting useful software or having the
> installer sneakily download components in the background.

-- 
:wq