Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01

[Bruce Hill <daddy@happypenguincomputers.com>]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:48:11AM -0400, Greg Woodbury wrote:
> 
> To answer Alan's question - the main fault lies on the GNOME project and 
> the forcing for systemd down user's systems throats.
> 
> Additionally, as certina things were added to Linux to "enhance" 
> capabilities, the GNOME developers (apparently) *deliberately* placed 
> the programs in /usr/bin, instead of in the generally accepted place of 
> /bin.
> 
> Alan is correct - there is a deliberate cause of this debacle.  Certain 
> folks (Lennart being one of many) *are* cramming their vision of Linux 
> on the whole community.
> 
> I have read severl folks defending their ignoring of the old protocol of 
> placing boot-required programs in /bin (and hence on root) as being 
> holdovers from "ancient history" and claiming that disk space is so 
> cheap these days that it "isn't necessary" to keep this distinction.
> 
> As a result of the GNOMEish forcing, some distros have even gone so far 
> as to *do away* with /bin - and have placed everything in /usr/bin with 
> compatibility symlinks as a holdover/workaround.
> 
> I lay this at the feet of GNOME, and thus, at the feet of RedHat.
> 
> Linux used to be about *choice*  aand leaving up to the users/admins 
> about how they wanted to configure their systems.  But certain forces in 
> the Linux marketplace are hell-bent on imitating Microsoft's "one way to 
> do it" thinking that they are outdoing the "evil empire's" evilness.
> 
> I fully understand systemd and see that it is a solution seeking a 
> problem to solve.  And its developers, being nearly identical with the 
> set of GNOME developers, are forcing this *thing* on the Linux universe.
> 
> Certainly, the SystemV init system needed to have a way of 
> *automagically/automatically* handling a wider set of dependencies. When 
> we wrote if for System IV at Bell Labs in 1981 or so, we didn't have the 
> time to solve the problem of having the computer handle the dependencies 
> and moved the handling out to the human mind to solve by setting the 
> numerical sequence numbers.  (I was one of the writers for System IV 
> init while a contractor.)
> 
> OpenRC provided a highly compatible and organic extension of the system, 
> and Gentoo has been happy for severl years with it.  But now, the same 
> folks who are thrusting GNOME/systemd down the throats of systems 
> everywhere, have invaded or gained converts enought in the Gentoo 
> structure to try and force their way on Gentoo.
> 
> Gentoo may be flexible enough to allow someone to write an overlay that 
> moves the necessary things back to /bin (and install symlinks from 
> /usr/bin to /bin) so that an initrd/initramfs is not required.  But I 
> suspect that Gentoo and many distributions are too far gone down the 
> path of deception to recover.
> 
> Neil and other may disagree with this assessment, but I saw it coming 
> and this is not the first time it has been pointed out - and not just by me.
> 
> Who knows though? I may just have to abandon prepared distributions 
> completely and do a Linux From Scratch solution, or fork some distro and 
> tey to undo the worst of the damage.
> 
> -- 
> G.Wolfe Woodbury
> redwolfe@gmail.com

And that, folks, is the best and most accurate summary I've read to date.

Thank you, sir, for stepping up to the plate.

A friend of mine has his own Linux distro (has for a long time), and explained
this to me some time ago. He's not effected by this.

Bruce
-- 
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