On 30/04/2015 20:16, John Morris wrote:
> He is correct on this point. One should always obey the rules until you
> understand why the rule was made and the consequences of breaking it.

Except that the rule we're talking about just shouldn't be violated.


> Once upon a time the rule was that / should have everything needed to
> complete the booting of the system and to get a rescue shell. But Linux
> already violates that rule in that a naked kernel often can't access or
> mount / itself, which is why an initrd is usually used to start things
> off.
>
> Once that is accepted as something unavoidable, and it is unavoidable in
> a world of lvm, multiple software RAID implementations, wide variety of
> filesystems and such, the idea of / having the tools for mounting
> everything else is impractical. It made sense when / was on a fixed
> disk with driver support baked into the kernel and there was only one or
> two filesystems available.

You are committing the same error as the systemd people here, i.e.
you are assuming that it is always the case and there's nothing else than
general-purpose distro kernels with lvm, RAID and the kitchen sink,
provided by mainstream distributions for the desktop world or the server
world.
This is not the case, and this is not even the common case. The majority
of Linux systems today is embedded devices.

Breaking the embedded world to perform a very minor optimization (what is
the benefit of joining /bin and /usr/bin again ?) on desktop or server PCs
simply isn't reasonable engineering.


> Now as for other assertions in this thread that the FHS itself is
> obsolete and violations of it should not be considered a bad thing, just
> no.

I don't think anyone said that.


> The FHS was carefully designed

Stopped reading there.

--
Laurent