Hi all,

This idea came to me while I wrote an anti-merge rant a few minutes
ago...

You know, times have changed. Today, a 256GB SSD can be had for less
than $100, and can easily, trivially, hold the entire operating system.

One excellent configuration is to have the root partition, hosted by a
SSD, be root (/) and contain /usr/bin. The contents of /usr/bin almost
never change, meaning that you get very little wear and tear on your
SSD. Matter of fact, of the usual suspects, only /var and /tmp
experience much churn.

If / is formatted ext4, it can be mounted directly by a kernel with ext4
drivers, no initramfs needed. Then, using the /usr/bin and /usr/lib
from that root partition, almost any configuration can be built up with
calls to mount, the luks utilities, lvm stuff, btrfs utils, plus
drivers, all of which are on the root, not on a separate partition.

All that would be required is a shellscript, with stuff that can be
commented in and out, capable of mounting everything else once / is
mounted. After everything is mounted, the rest of the boot is
accomplished in the usual way.

You might ask why this is any different than just using initramfs,
which is meant for the purpose. The answer is transparency: You can
put /usr/bin/bash commands anywhere in there to periscope in and run
the rest. You can comment out the line that execs the real PID1, and
take a look around. You could even change your init system in that
shellscript, instead of in the Grub config. You could even (this is
getting far fetched) give the user a prompted choice of init systems. I
could have used that when I was A/B-ing between Epoch and Runit during
the Manjaro Experiments.

This wouldn't be mandatory. It wouldn't be default. But it would
provide one more attraction to the person who wants to be in control of
his computer, rather than vice-versa. I think it would be a feather in
Devuan's cap, and would further differentiate Devuan from Debian.

SteveT

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