Re: [gentoo-dev] busybox[sep-usr] support for mounting /usr w/out hassle

[William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 12:00:59PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 4:05 AM, Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon
> <chainsaw@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Binaries that are essential for system boot, and must be available in
> > single user mode go in /bin and /sbin, with their libraries in /lib.
> > This allows for /usr to be:
> > 1) marked read-only for NFS mounts, which some of us rely on
> > 2) inside of an LVM2 container, allowing for / to be (very) small
> > 3) on a squashfs filesystem, in order to save space
> 
> These are all things easily supported with an initramfs.  In fact,
> initramfs-based solutions allow the same sorts of things to be done
> with all the other filesystems and not just /usr.

This is correct.

> > Trying to second-guess my motivation, and trying to undo unanimous
> > council votes simply because your opinion is different, really has to
> > stop.
> 
> I don't think anybody is trying to undo council votes - people are
> just speculating as to what they voted on.  The easiest solution is
> for somebody to say "I'm John Smith, and I am speaking officially for
> the council, and we agree that what was decided upon is X."

Yes, this is correct. I read the log over several times and it isn't
clear what the council actually voted on. Tony, it seems clear that you want to
mandate that gentoo in its default configuration will support separate
/usr without an initramfs. The thing that isn't clear is whether the
rest of the council wants to do that. In reading the log, there was
definite uncertainty about whether the vote was just to continue
supporting /usr as a separate configuration or to mandate how
separate /usr was going to be supported in the default configuration.

> It seems pretty clear that everybody wants to support a separate /usr.
>  We even have multiple supported solutions, including an initramfs, a
> use flag on busybox, and I believe somebody posted a script that can
> be run during early boot to mount /usr.  It sounds like the only thing
> that isn't supported is "doing nothing" - but with Gentoo if you "do
> nothing" you don't get an installed system that works on any
> configuration.
 
Rich, you are absolutely right. There is not an argument anywhere about
whether separate /usr is supported.

> > I feel a lot better about vapier's pragmatic approach then I do about
> > udev/systemd upstream's ability and motivation to support current
> > systems. If you had any doubts about whether udev was part of the
> > problem, consider what tarball you will have to extract it from in future.
> 
> Well, if others feel differently about the direction udev is taking,
> they can of course just fork it.
> 
> I can't say I'm terribly excited about the amount of vertical
> integration going on.  I don't run Gnome, and I don't run Unity.  I
> really do prefer the unix way.
 
 I'm not excited about parts of the vertical integration either. Newer
 versions of gnome are going to start requiring systemd from what I've
 heard, and I disagree with that level of integration.

> However, I don't contribute much to those upstream projects, and I
> don't see much value in telling a bunch of people who do that they are
> doing it wrong.  I don't like how Google develops Android in the dark,
> or that they bundle 1GB of third-party stuff in their Chromium source
> and distribute a favored binary-only derivative.  However, I do like
> that they're giving me all of that stuff essentially for free, and so
> beyond the odd blog post I try not to give them too hard a time.
> 
> In the same way I think we need to give the maintainers of these
> projects in Gentoo some slack, or join those projects and help them to
> address your needs.  It is a lot easier to tell others what to do than
> to help make it happen, but a volunteer-based project like Gentoo
> needs the latter more than the former.

Agreed.

William


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