On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 11:22:59AM -1000, Joel Roth wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 02:20:30PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> > I note without objection (but rather with active appreciation, on
> > entertainment grounds) that every single one of your talking point so
> > far -- including the one above -- appear to have been copied
> > near-verbatim from the pair of Freedesktop.org UsrMerge advocacy Web
> > pages I dissected in this forum yesterday. Nicely played, sir!
> >
> > The above appears to have been copied from:
> > https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/

Heh. It's been raised on #debian-devel today, too. The hard question was:

14:18 < bunk> mbiebl_: What are the "of course" benefits of merged /usr for
              a user?  For a distribution I see the benefits of moving to
              merged /usr only, but I honestly don't know in what cases
              "Installing the usrmerge package will solve your problem."
              would be a correct answer to a user problem.

Obviously, none of usrmerge proponents provided such an use case.

Note that UsrMerge is not about dropping support for booting with a split fs
and no initrd -- that's already done, and was a matter of reducing developer
effort in return for hurting a very rare user use case. Here, the DNG
thread revolves around this piece -- but UsrMerge (as in, the usrmerge
package and debootstrap option) is only about pointlessly moving files.

> Just to add fuel to the fire, I'll note that among the
> benefits listed is this gem:
>

>     Improved compatibility with current upstream development: In 
>     order to minimize the delta from your Linux distribution to
>     upstream development the /usr merge is key.

>
> If upstream signifies freedesktop.org (and who else could it
> be?) I think this is a pretty frank expression of their
> direction.

The thing is, the Red Hat world is rapidly going away. It's very hard to
gauge the use share of distributions as 1. various use cases have different
needs, 2. the vast majority of such use cases are hidden. Among what
little solid data we have, it's probably easiest to measure web server
share: all RPM distributions together are around 20% while they were at 65%
just a few years ago. I imagine other use types to be alike.

Thus, Red Hat is the new Solaris. It already went through dropping use
share, and has just been snarfed by a corporation whose primary mode is
wringing few lucrative customers dry. Like Solaris, I expect it to last
less than a decade before the core team is laid off, major future releases
cancelled... then to live in a zombie state for decades, like AIX or HP-UX.
It will continue to make big $$$$s for IBM. Heck, COBOL still processes a
good part of financial data. But no one among us even see anything COBOL.

With the Red Hat ship sinking, so will freedesktop.org (as they're merely
one of Red Hat's subprojects). On the other hand, systemd will survive in
the medium term -- it was carefully designed as monolithic in a good part to
make jumping ship hard, thus even in the worst (for them) case it'll get
forked and continued by Ubuntu or Arch.


Meow!
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ I was born a dumb, ugly and work-loving kid, then I got swapped on
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ the maternity ward.