Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items -- Council meeting 2012-05-08

[William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org>]

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On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 08:21:41PM +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> In two weeks from now, the council will meet again.  This is the time
> to raise and prepare items that the council should put on the agenda to         
> vote on.
> 
> Please respond to this email with agenda items.  Please do not hestitate
> to repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you previously
> suggested one (since the last meeting).

Council members,

I am very concerned about your vote last meeting with regard to separate
/usr being supported. Whether or not it will be supported is not a valid
question, because it will be.

There is now division in the community about your vote, so I am formally
requesting a clarification.

I can assure the council that we are not going to try to stabilize newer
versions of udev out of hand. We have a tracker bug open which will show
all of the tasks we need to complete before that happens [1].

Once that happens, I want to start looking into the /usr merge (see
below).

I think the more appropriate question is, do we want to continue
attempting to support /usr as a separate partition without an initramfs?

This affects much more than udev. There is another event happening in
the linux community which is referred to as the /usr merge [2]. I know
this is happening on Fedora. I believe archlinux is looking into doing
this, and Debian is as well.

One advantage gentoo, as a distro, would have if we do the /usr merge is
that we can get rid of gen_usr_ldscript. This was put in place as a
workaround [3], and we would be able to remove it.

Any distribution which does the /usr merge will not be able to support /usr
as a separate partition without an initramfs, and I think it is just a
matter of time until packages don't check /{sbin,bin,lib*} any longer.

We did have a pretty extensive discussion on the dev mailing list
regarding the /usr merge, and my feeling from the community was that we
should do this [4].

In summary, I feel that if we continue supporting separate /usr without
an initramfs, we will be harming our distro in the long run, so I would
ask you to please carefully consider this before you vote.

Thanks much,

William

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411627
[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge
[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4411
[4] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_c3c5bdabbe058b08627ff04cee896af3.xml

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