Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Let's redesign the entire filesystem!

[Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 07:27:07PM -0400, Richard Yao wrote:
> >> 3. Why not let the users choose where these directories go and support
> >> both locations?
> > 
> > Because a plethera of options is a sure way to make sure that half of
> > them don't work over the long run.
> > 
> > We aren't Debian here people, we don't support "everything" :)
> 
> Gentoo provides far more options than Debian does, so this seems
> somewhat contradictory to me.

Not really, I don't think we support systems without udev anymore,
right?  And we get away with a lot of these different "options" at
compile time, which makes it easier than what Debian has to handle, so
perhaps it's not a fair comparison.

> > If you want to support both, great, feel free to step up and do the
> > work.
> 
> Fair enough, however, I should remind you that not much will happen
> without a decision from the Gentoo Council. I am willing to accept
> whatever decision they make, but I think that exposing this decision to
> users is something that is within our ability to do.

I didn't think the Council ruled on technical questions.

In fact, how is this relevant at all anyway?  It's quite simple in that
we don't support systems today with a separate /usr/ without a
initramfs/initrd.  If it happens to work, wonderful, but don't expect
Gentoo developers to rewrite the upstream packages to work for this type
of unsupported systems, it's not going to happen.

Or are you referring to the "no more /bin and /sbin" thing?  That's just
going to happen "naturally", one day in a few months or years, your
system will have moved to this without you even realizing it :)

> Portage provides use with the ability to do abstractions that other
> distributions cannot do, such as permitting people to merge
> /usr{bin,lib{32,64,},sbin} into /.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that the packages that are being merged will
actually work :)

greg k-h