On Fri, 01 Jan 2016 15:45:49 +0100
Micky Del Favero <micky@???> wrote:

> Daniel Reurich <daniel@???> writes:
>
> > So the potteringisation continues...
>
> If I remember well Solaris has /bin linked to /usr/bin since many
> years, so linking /bin to /usr/bin is not a poetteringisation, or
> almost it's not an original idea of poettering.
>
> Ciao, Micky

Well, OK, if we're really going to discuss this...

This *is* poetterization, regardless of what Sun or anyone else did
before. It's supported by Freedesktop.org, and I think everyone here can
agree that anything Freedesktop supports is anti-init choice,
anti-simplicity, anti-modularity, and pro-systemd.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/

Those of you who have tried to lay down an alternate init system, to
replace systemd, without the aid of a package manager, will probably
agree with me that the toughest obstacle isn't udev, it isn't dbus,
it's initramfs. I looked up the word "black box" in the dictionary last
night, and they had a picture of initramfs.

Hey, I'll be the first to admit that sometimes you need an initramfs.
Maybe you have LUKS plus LVM plus software raid. Merge or not, you'll
need to compile yourself one heck of a kernel to avoid needing
initramfs. But for the very prevalent use case of Ext4, no raid, no
LVM, no LUKS, no silly merge, and a few partitions, initramfs is as
useful as udders on a snake. I mean seriously, in such a use case, you
forego initramfs: boot to the root partition, run /sbin/mount -a, and
bang, you have all resources available to you. But nooooooo.

Initramfs does have one big benefit for the Poetterists: It provides a
dark, safe place for them to start up their megacomplexities and call
it magic. Oh, there are tools with which you can periscope into
initramfs, but have you ever really looked at everything in an
initramfs? It's a jungle in there. Just right for the Poetterists to
incubate their plague.

Now, the Freedesktop.Org to which I referred earlier in this email has
a link to the following Rob Landley page explaining what they call the
"historical reasons" for separate directories:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html

Note that Landley's #1 reason for merging is the existance of
initramfs. Now I'm not stupid enough to call the author of Busybox a
Poetterist. He wrote this in 2010, before anyone really knew the
Napoleonistic aspirations of systemd, back in the days when a complex
and opaque "early boot" wasn't a big deal.

But now it's 5 years later, and that early boot black box is exactly
where the Poetterists fester most virulently.

In summary, if you accept the merge and /usr on a separate partition,
you need initramfs. And if you have initramfs, you've just made it
three times as hard to lay down Runit or Epoch or s6 or Suckless Init
plus daemontools-encore plus Littkit.

We all have to pick our own battles, and I'm not sure how much effort
I'd make to roll back the merge. It may indeed be a good thing that
only 3 changes are required to patch up Devuan for the merge. But make
no mistake about it: regardless of its initial motivation, today the
merge's primary beneficiaries are Red Hat and their proxies,
Freedesktop.org and Lennart Poettering.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
November 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques