On Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:28:14 -0800, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote: >I do understand why people working in the embedded space care about some >unusual mount orderings, file system separations, and very light cores, >and I hope that we can accomodate and support all of their use cases >inside Debian. I think that's the most productive part of this thread.
We have already shown how "much" we care about the users of non-Linux kernels in Debian ("not at all, they can happily go fishing"). I have no doubt that we're going to do the same thing to embedded users if we can trade those users for a few seconds per year in startup time. And I fear that we're going to lose a few more important contributors that way. And we're all doing this to keep our upstreams and Ubuntu happy. Is it worth this? >But I don't get why people who are using non-embedded UNIX systems >particularly care. I, for example, am afraid of having to merge /usr in existing systems during upgrades, causing repartitions to be necessary. I am afraid of partition layout suddenly not fitting any more during an upgrade, causing downtimes and customers considering to take the opportunity to migrate to a really supported enterprise distribution. And, I really don't want to have to adapt, test and verify scripts and backup schemes to changed partition layout. This will be necessary for new systems, and it is really a horror vision to have to do this for existing systems during upgrades. >If you've used UNIX for a long time, you've seen >binaries in all sorts of bizarre and irritating locations. This is minor >compared to the organizational differences between various commercial >UNIXes back in the day. I decided for Debian to get rid of this. Now we're planning to cause this _inside_ Debian. >> There is no such thing as a single user mode boot with only the rootfs >> anymore. > >Yes, there is. The rootfs just includes /usr. Which is, in my case, the case for a single-digit number of tiny VMs in a park of a couple of hundred systems with separate /usr. The majory of those systems hasn't been reinstalled or even repartitioned in years. Please don't force me to do that during an upgrade. >> PS: And i hate giving up on technical issues. > >That's the whole thing, though. Maintaining a meaningful /bin and /lib >vs. /usr split is not primarily a technical issue. It's a coordination >issue. The technical work for a single package is painful only because >moving things is really painful. The problem is more that it affects >thousands of packages maintained by numerous different maintainers who are >never testing that configuration and may not even be aware that it exists. And it affects hundreds of thousands of installed systems. >Another word for "giving up" is "applying sane prioritization." We can't >fix every wishlist bug. Is this one actually worth the effort? So it is a wishlist bug to keep things as broken as they were always been? Greetings Marc -- -------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834