Re: [gentoo-dev] [PATCH] use.desc: add global USE flag 'split-sbin'

[Jaco Kroon <jaco@uls.co.za>]

Hi,

-- large trim --
>> For what it's worth.  All of my systems are installed with a fixed-
>> size
>> 512MB / with everything else (including /usr) on separate LVs.
>>
>> Whilst sbin vs bin is just a matter of what's available, to me it
>> makes
>> sense to keep these split.  To me it's always been logical to keep
>> administrative type (root) tools under sbin, and stuff that's
>> generally
>> useful for users under bin.
>>
>> Keeping / and /usr split (or the ability to keep it split) is rather
>> crucial for me.  It's for historic installations a matter of space
>> constraints on /.  For new installations it's a matter of keeping /
>> as
>> small as possible in order to have a smallish bootable system which
>> can
>> be used for recovering the rest of the system, ideally without an
>> initrd
>> (which also works to an extent).
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Jaco
>>
> For the umpteenth time time: nothing will change. You can keep your
> (albeit broken) separate / and /usr partitions. *NOTHING* will change
> for anyone. There are no plans to change the defaults. This is *MERELY*
> about giving people the chance to opt in to the /usr-merge.
Thanks for the confirmation.  As long as it's an OPTION I'm happy.  And
no, other than on my desktop machine a split /usr is working very well,
and even in that case a split off /lib/firmware actually caused me much,
much more problems (for i915 and amdgpu firmware) than a split /usr. 
Unfortunately /lib/firmware grew over the years and so I had no choice
other than to split it off after the fact.
>
> That said, the idea of using / as a "recovery" filesystem in general is
> broken: 
> https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
> And no, this is not systemd breaking your system, or Lennart, it's
> distros and userlands not being careful to have things in / never
> depend on things in /usr.

It's saved my butt more than once when the (extremely) limited tools in
the initrds on those same systems failed to do so.  Mostly these cases
weren't Gentoo.  Yes RHEL, I'm looking at you.  Gentoo I generally
recover crazy faults without the use of system rescue CDs (probably
required it 10 times over 15 years).  Can't say the same for those
distro's pushing for "recovery systems in initrd", and I'm running
probably 3x more Gentoo systems than all other distro's combined.

The only stuff so far I really wished worked without /usr was editors
such as vim and/or nano (sed sufficed in those cases).

Would contributing a script that's able to check which binaries in /bin
(and /sbin) depend on libs not also on / be useful here?  Perhaps as a
QA check somehow?

And I get that that's a completely different rabbit hole ...

1.  What about non-lib files, eg, /usr/share/zoneinfo?
2.  Should such binaries be moved to /usr or should the libraries be
moved to /?
X.  a gazillion things I haven't even started to think about.

Kind Regards,
Jaco


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