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Author: Didier Kryn
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] FW: support for merged /usr in Debian
Le 01/01/2016 18:07, Steve Litt a écrit :
> 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:
> jitsi_2.8.5426-1_amd64.deb
> 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
>


     Sorry Steve but I think you are making some confusion.


     Before initramfs, there was initrd for the same major purpose: to 
load the necessary device driver to operate the hard disk drive. 
initramfs is just more clever than initrd. The kernel developpers, IIRC, 
have developped their own set of applications for use in the 
initrsmfs/initrd.


     Busybox OTH was not developped for initramfs at all, and Rob 
Landley was only one of many developpers of Busybox (he's now 
developping his own alternative). The fact is that Busybox has 
superseeded anything else in the initramfs because it contains a whole 
Unix base system in a very small program which doesn't even need a 
dynamic library.


     I doubt Rob Landley had Systemd in mind when he advocated to merge 
/bin and /usr/bin. As a matter of fact Busybox installs its symlinks in 
/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin by default.


     Didier