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

[Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org>]

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On 03/14/2012 04:39, Duncan wrote:

> 
> THAT is why they're moving /bin, /sbin and /lib to /usr rather than the 
> other direction.  rootfs will be ONLY a mountpoint, with even /etc/ being 
> bind-mounted from /usr/etc, and all system data unified on /usr, 
> including /etc.
> 
> Viewed from that perspective, the direction of the "unification", 
> everything formerly on rootfs moving to /usr, so rootfs' only function is 
> providing the mountpoints for everything else, has a certain logic to 
> it...


From one perspective, this makes sense.  It actually is a kinda of holy
grail for administrators, because it's one less filesystem to worry about
backing up.


> And they don't care about non-initr* based systems any more than they 
> care about non-Linux systems or for that matter, non-systemd Linux 
> systems.  That's outside their operational universe.  Other people are 
> welcome to continue working with "legacy" systems if they want, but Linux-
> only, systemd-based, initr*-based systems are the only thing they're 
> interested in supporting, themselves.


You know, I would have no problem with this if it wasn't a decision made by
a single Linux distro with a huge amount of clout in the Linux world.  This
isn't like Debian forking Firefox into Ice Weasel, an issue that largely
remains Debian-specific to this day.  This is a change that will
fundamentally alter the way every distro does things, and none of us (as far
as I know) were given a choice in the matter.

The /usr move is going to happen.  I, along with a lot of other people, are
going to have to "fix" all my installed systems over this.  Not because of a
choice made by all distros, but because one distro thinks that its way is
the RightWay() and the OnlyWay().

That's what I disagree with.  We shouldn't be affected by this change.  Only
Fedora users should have to deal with it.  But other upstream projects are
going to follow in Fedora's lead, and this brings us up to a decision point:
adapt, or become irrelevant.

I chose to stick with Gentoo as my distro of choice because I didn't like
the way Red Hat did things years ago.  As well as a few other nitpicks I
have.  It bugs me to no end that, despite running a fairly vanilla setup on
a source-based distro whose original inspiration came from BSD ports, I am
still affected by a decision made by RH.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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