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

[Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info>]

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On Dec 25, 2012 1:55 AM, "Alan McKinnon" <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:58:15 -0600
> Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

The convention stuck for a loooooong time because it works, it's
reasonable, and it does not place unduly restrictions on the SysAdmin.

Even back when hard disks are a mote in the eyes of today's mammoths, you
*can* make /usr part of /, there's no stopping you. Sure, other SysAdmins
may scoff and/or question your sanity, but the choice is yours. YOU know
what's best for your precious servers, YOU made the call.

But with the latest udev, Lennart et al saw it fit to yank that choice out
of the hands of SysAdmins, while at the same time trying to enforce a
stupidly overbloated init replacement.

> 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...)
>

When you're in charge of over 100 servers as the back-end of a
multinational company that has a revenue in excess of 10 million USD per
day, even a temporary outage means the CIO, COO, and CEO breathing down
your neck.

There's an adage: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> 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.
>

No. I prefer any mucking in /usr to have as small effect as possible to /

That I what SysAdmins worth their salary do: compartment everything. Reduce
interdependencies as much as possible.

> 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.
>

The way I see it, it's /usr integrated into / that introduces fragility.
Too much going on in /

In case you haven't noticed, since Windows 7 (or Vista, forget which)
Microsoft has even went the distance of splitting between C: (analogous to
/usr) and 'System Partition' (analogous to /). The boot process is actually
handled by the 100ish MB 'System Partition' before being handed to C:. This
will at least give SysAdmins a fighting chance of recovering a botched
maintenance.

(Note: Said behavior will only be visible if installing onto a clean hard
disk. If there are partitions left over from previous Windows installs,
Win7 will not create a separate 'System Partition')

So, if Microsoft saw the light, why does Red Hat sunk into darkness
instead?

> --
> Alan McKinnon
> alan.mckinnon@gmail.com
>
>

Rgds,
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