Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone switched to eudev yet?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:58:15 -0600
Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

> So, Nuno, everything was fine until they started moving things to a
> place where it shouldn't be. 

No Dale, that is just flat out wrong.

There is no such thing as "place where stuff should be". There are only
conventions, and like all conventions, rituals, fashions and traditions
these are prone to breakage when things move on. Things move on because
they become way more complex than the designer of the convention thought
they would (or could).

The truth is simply this (derived from empirical observation):

Long ago we had established conventions about / and /usr; mostly
because the few sysadmins around agreed on some things. In those days
there was no concept of a packager or maintainer, there was only a
sysadmin. This person was a lot like me - he decided and if you didn't
like it that was tough. So things stayed as they were for a very long
time.

Thankfully, it is not like that anymore and the distinction between 
/ and /usr is now so blurry there might as well not be a distinction.
Which is good as the distinction wasn't exactly a good thing from day
1 either - it was useful for terminal servers (only by convention) and
let the sysadmin keep his treasured uptime (which only proves he isn't
doing kernel maintenance...)

I'm sorry you bought into the crap about / and /usr that people of my
ilk foisted on you, but the time for that is past, and things move on.
If there is to be a convention, there can be only one that makes any
sense:

/ and /usr are essentially the same, so put your stuff anywhere you
want it to be. ironically this no gives you the ultimate in choice, not
the false one you had for years. So if your /usr is say 8G, then
enlarge / bu that amount, move /usr over and retain all your mount
points as the were. Now for the foreseeable future anything you might
want to hotplug at launch time stands a very good chance of working as
expected.

You will only need an initrd if you have / on striped RAID or LVM or
similar, but that is a boot strap problem not a /usr problem (and you
do not have such a setup). Right now you need an initrd anyway to boot
such setups.

The design of separate / and /usr on modern machines IS broken by
design. It is fragile and causes problems in the large case. This
doesn't mean YOUR system is broken and won't boot, it means it causes
unnecessary hassle in the whole ecosystem, and the fix is to change
behaviour and layout to something more appropriate to what we have
today.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com