Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting: Tuesday 11 November 2012, 19:00 UTC

[William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org>]

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All,

I would like to add information wrt the separate /usr issue.

On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 10:28:16PM +0100, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> 2. Handling separate /usr support[1] (15 minutes)
>    - approve/disapprove plan (forcing everyone to take action, and
>      implement one of the two "supported" solutions)

The tracker bug [1] shows what we are still waiting for in order to
implement this plan. Mostly now it is just stabilizations. It also shows
the things that can't go forward without it. One thing is udev stabilization;
however, this also blocks udisks:2 which is used by at least newer versions of
gnome and XFCE, so we are preventing those from going stable.

>    - approve/disapprove removal of gen_usr_ldscript

A better way to put this is disabling gen_usr_ldscript on Linux.
Some of the alternate platforms still use it, so I do not advocate
killing the function.
If we go forward with the plan, there is no reason the council should
reject disabling gen_usr_ldscript on Linux that I am aware of.

This also has to wait until the blockers are resolved on the tracker.

>    - define timeframe
>      * 30 days
>      * 6 months
>      * 1 year
 
Once the blockers are done and we release a news item, implementing
one of the choices is a matter of emerging a package, possibly running a
command (genkernel with the appropriate options) and updating your boot
loader configuration before your next reboot.

Considering that we are holding back stabilizations of more and more
packages the longer we wait, is it really a good idea to extend the time
frame to 6 months or a year?

It is true that udev/udisks have had a hand in bringing separate /usr to
the forefront this time; however, it was brought to the forefront 10
years ago by the toolchain [2].

There is at least one other issue I can think of that is technically
broken but fails gracefully with mounting /usr late in Linux.
That issue is locales since the information for them is in /usr/share/locale.
This also becomes a non-issue as soon as we implement this plan.

Thanks,

William

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411627
[2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4411

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