On Fri, 01 Jan 2016 15:45:49 +0100 Micky Del Favero <mi...@mesina.net> wrote:
> Daniel Reurich <dan...@centurion.net.nz> writes: > > > So the potteringisation continues... > > If I remember well Solaris has /bin linked to /usr/bin since many > years, so linking /bin to /usr/bin is not a poetteringisation, or > almost it's not an original idea of poettering. > > Ciao, Micky Well, OK, if we're really going to discuss this... This *is* poetterization, regardless of what Sun or anyone else did before. It's supported by Freedesktop.org, and I think everyone here can agree that anything Freedesktop supports is anti-init choice, anti-simplicity, anti-modularity, and pro-systemd. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/ Those of you who have tried to lay down an alternate init system, to replace systemd, without the aid of a package manager, will probably agree with me that the toughest obstacle isn't udev, it isn't dbus, it's initramfs. I looked up the word "black box" in the dictionary last night, and they had a picture of initramfs. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that sometimes you need an initramfs. Maybe you have LUKS plus LVM plus software raid. Merge or not, you'll need to compile yourself one heck of a kernel to avoid needing initramfs. But for the very prevalent use case of Ext4, no raid, no LVM, no LUKS, no silly merge, and a few partitions, initramfs is as useful as udders on a snake. I mean seriously, in such a use case, you forego initramfs: boot to the root partition, run /sbin/mount -a, and bang, you have all resources available to you. But nooooooo. Initramfs does have one big benefit for the Poetterists: It provides a dark, safe place for them to start up their megacomplexities and call it magic. Oh, there are tools with which you can periscope into initramfs, but have you ever really looked at everything in an initramfs? It's a jungle in there. Just right for the Poetterists to incubate their plague. Now, the Freedesktop.Org to which I referred earlier in this email has a link to the following Rob Landley page explaining what they call the "historical reasons" for separate directories: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html Note that Landley's #1 reason for merging is the existance of initramfs. Now I'm not stupid enough to call the author of Busybox a Poetterist. He wrote this in 2010, before anyone really knew the Napoleonistic aspirations of systemd, back in the days when a complex and opaque "early boot" wasn't a big deal. But now it's 5 years later, and that early boot black box is exactly where the Poetterists fester most virulently. In summary, if you accept the merge and /usr on a separate partition, you need initramfs. And if you have initramfs, you've just made it three times as hard to lay down Runit or Epoch or s6 or Suckless Init plus daemontools-encore plus Littkit. We all have to pick our own battles, and I'm not sure how much effort I'd make to roll back the merge. It may indeed be a good thing that only 3 changes are required to patch up Devuan for the merge. But make no mistake about it: regardless of its initial motivation, today the merge's primary beneficiaries are Red Hat and their proxies, Freedesktop.org and Lennart Poettering. SteveT Steve Litt November 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng