Re: [gentoo-user] systemd installation location

[Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Daniel Campbell <lists@sporkbox.us> wrote:
> Anyway, I'm not in favor of FHS _per se_, but it sounds pretty
> reasonable to have some semblance of order among where different parts
> of a system go. Shoving everything into /usr and symlinking everything
> else seems like a stop-gap or good-enough solution that came about due
> to ignoring the existing standard (FHS) and refusing to try to change
> it. I could be wrong, though. My point is I'm not dogmatic about it; I
> just think that if the FOSS community were willing, a better solution
> could be crafted.

It's true that it's nice to have a semblance of order where different parts go.
But "all libraries and binaries in /usr" is also a semblance of order. You don't
separate stuff for the sake of separating stuff. You separate them because you
have a good reason to separate them. It turns out that there isn't a good reason
to separate them, and that there's no way to predictably separate them.

Mushing them together isn't just a stop-gap or good-enough solution. The
idea of keeping system-critical separate from non-critical was not maintainable
in the long run to begin with.

>> If you were in the shoes of the ebuild packagers, you would be hard-pressed to
>> predict which packages belong in the / PREFIX and which ones in /usr PREFIX,
>> 100 times out of 100. But you need 100 times out of 100 or you'll get
>> people whining
>> that they can't boot or whining that they need to do some migration. That's
>> why / and /usr separation is broken.
>>
> I agree, but perhaps the / and /usr separation is a symptom of a greater
> problem instead of being the problem in and of itself. Like Inception,
> maybe we need to go further. :P

The greater problem is what I'm pointing out already. Even in principle, you
just can't predict which files belong in /. It's always been a case-by-case,
system-by-system thing, and it just so happens that 99.9xxx% of the cases
are the same. Distro packagers, however, have to decide for 100% of the cases.
So they're going to end up making weird decisions that are easy for you to
second-guess but are actually tough.

If you want to solve the "hard problem", you want to create a tool that
will automate / and /usr migrations. Portage has to be aware of the tool
and maybe 100% of ebuilds will have to be rewritten to take advantage of the
dynamic prefixes set by the tool. That solves it for good, and you can have
your / and /usr separate. But only for gentoo.

Every package manager needs to have a similar tool and similar intelligence
for that to work.
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