On Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:45:02 +0100
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 12:14:33PM +0100, Joerg Reisenweber wrote:
> > The "too much work" argument is a very embarrassing one - it's the
> > genuine duty of distro maintainers to take care of exactly such
> > stuff. The argument that something was "too much work" (for the
> > distro maintainers, or even the developers) is moot unless you're
> > doing all that for yourself or for developers instead of your
> > users. Claiming that a decision whether to put a package into /bin
> > or /usr/bin (resp *sbin*) was "too much work" is also outright
> > silly, there's zero additional workload in placing the package into
> > the right location, except for the needed knowhow and decision
> > itself. It's just for the laziness of developers of boot/init
> > process when they demand to indiscriminately have access to *all*
> > existing binaries in /usr
>
> The work involved is not just "zero", it's _massive_. Have you
> looked at how extensive dependency chains

There's a reason /sbin stood for STATIC bin.

> can be for complex setups?
> Try mounting a filesystem over wifi that requires a fancy
> authentication daemon.

OK fine, for sure for sure. For the 10% doing ultra-unusual stuff, boot
to a combined /bin. For the other 90%, the / partition can have
an /sbin directory with the necessary static programs to mount the root
partition. Once the root partition is mounted, /etc/fstab can be found
and run. And yeah, you'll need some sort of directly-on-/ drivers and
firmware too,for the common stuff.

I'll bet 3/4 of the people can boot no-initramfs to an /ext? root, and
mount /usr to do the rest of the mounts. The rest, which might be able
to be considered an edge case, can use initramfs and boot to a
joined /bin.

How hard would it be to put the drivers for ext? monolithically in the
kernel, along with necessary drivers for lvm and luks?

One more thing: What did people do before maybe 2010,
when /sbin, /bin, /usr/sbin, and /user/bin were four separate
directories? Was life that hard back then? Were develpers smarter?


SteveT

Steve Litt
November 2017 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust