Philip Hands wrote: > On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:03:10 +0800, Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Sat, 2011-12-24 at 10:25 +0000, Philip Hands wrote: > > > I'd still like to know what the compelling reason for the change is > > > though. > > > > Apparently the reason is simply that our upstreams (who it sounds like > > are predominantly driven by Redhat folks) are dropping support for / > > and /usr on different partitions and that re-adding that support or > > maintaining the existing support is too much work for the Debian > > maintainers involved. At least that is what started the thread.
Not quite. Redhat and others want to make this change (moving binaries and libraries from / into /usr) not just for ease of maintenance (though that makes sense too) but for several rather interesting reasons. It would consolidate almost everything managed by the package manager under /usr. Configuration would live in /etc (with templates possibly provided by packages, though more and more packages follow the "override files in /usr with files in /etc" approach and ship no /etc configuration by default). /var includes bits that change, which should not normally include package-managed bits. This would make /usr easy to snapshot, easy to exclude from backups, easy to share between systems, easy to mark read-only (mount --bind -o ro /usr /usr) and various other fun possibilities. > It would be nice to know a) which packages are actually likely to be > involved, and what sort of breakage we might expect to see if one were > foolish enough to carry on with a separate /usr, and what sorts of > separate /usr might provoke that breakage. > > That might allow us to come up with solutions that are not just: > > Everyone must have initramfs, like it or not. > > If we could break the problem down a bit, it might allow us to say > something more nuanced, like: > > If you're not using NFS4 for /usr, don't worry about it, but if you > are, you'll need to make sure that your initramfs supports mounting > /usr. > > at which point most of the nay-sayers would presumably shrug and find > something more interesting to whine about. ;-) At this point, the solution looks similar to that: "If you don't have /usr on a separate partition, you don't care. Otherwise, your initramfs must mount /usr." Debian systems without an initramfs already represent an uncommon case; you have to go out of your way to avoid having one, and you'd need a custom kernel. Systems with /usr on a separate partition also represent an uncommon case. This change would just prohibit the intersection of the two: you can't both have /usr on a separate partition *and* not have an initramfs. So, if you currently have /usr on a separate partition but you use an initramfs, you don't care. If you don't use an initramfs, but you have /usr on your root partition, you also don't care. If you have /usr on a separate partition *and* you don't currently have an initramfs, then you either need to start using an initramfs (which Debian makes very trivial to do) or you need to migrate the contents of /usr onto your root partition (which you can easily do on a live system as long as you either have enough space already or have LVM which you can live-resize). Does that help? - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111225041723.GA27634@leaf