On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 01:14:43AM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2017 at 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 can be for complex setups? Try mounting a
> > filesystem over wifi that requires a fancy authentication daemon. Every
> > involved package, and every library recursively depended upon by one of
> > those packages, would need to be moved to /{bin,sbin,lib}/.
>
> Looks trivial to me: /bin, /sbin executables have their dependencies and
> libraries in /lib on the same filesystem, just like /usr/bin, /usr/sbin
> and /usr/lib. What's so complicated?

But _which_ executables and libraries?

Are you prepared to move for example Java to /bin|/lib? It's an insane
language, yet somehow loved by enterprisey stuff, and is needed to
authenticate. And its dependency chains are extensive. This is not just
Java, there are far, far more such weird (to us) setups.

There's no sane way to move libraries at install time -- an universal
distribution would have to put into /lib anything that even a single user
needs.

And then, imagine you're the maintainer of some random library. You don't
care about Java, yet someone wrote java bindings to your library. Suddenly
you'd need to move everything to /lib. Would you get angry?

At some point, you say "enough".

> > Debian, with its north of 1000 developers, decided that, despite trying,
> > it's a lost cause. Do you think Devuan with 5 can do better?
>
> Last time I checked, Devuan does allow having /usr on a separate filesystem
> from /.

Yes, but only if you use an initrd. Some simple cases might work as such
support was dropped only late during the Stretch development cycle, but in
the future, you'd need to change several hundred packages.


Meow!
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