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Author: Stephanie Daugherty
Date:  
CC: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] FW: support for merged /usr in Debian
Regardless of who proposed it, merged /usr is still a reckless change that
needlessly complicates things.

The /usr and / split hasn't been perfectly followed, ever, but, still
achieves the goal of having a system that can be recovered from various
problems easily.

I should be able to substitute /bin/sh for init, and directly mount / and
go from there to a fully working system, regardless of my partitioning.
Period. If I can no longer do that, it's a broken system.




On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 9:25 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@???>
wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Jan 2016 19:33:41 +0100
> Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:
>
> > 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

>
> Hi Didier,
>
> Everything you say above is true, and none of it contradicts what I
> originally said.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> November 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
>      of the Successful Technologist
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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