On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 12:14:33PM +0100, Joerg Reisenweber wrote:
> The "too much work" argument is a very embarrassing one - it's the genuine
> duty of distro maintainers to take care of exactly such stuff. The argument
> that something was "too much work" (for the distro maintainers, or even the
> developers) is moot unless you're doing all that for yourself or for
> developers instead of your users.
> Claiming that a decision whether to put a package into /bin or /usr/bin (resp
> *sbin*) was "too much work" is also outright silly, there's zero additional
> workload in placing the package into the right location, except for the
> needed
> knowhow and decision itself. It's just for the laziness of developers of
> boot/init process when they demand to indiscriminately have access to *all*
> existing binaries in /usr
The work involved is not just "zero", it's _massive_. Have you looked at
how extensive dependency chains can be for complex setups? Try mounting a
filesystem over wifi that requires a fancy authentication daemon. Every
involved package, and every library recursively depended upon by one of
those packages, would need to be moved to /{bin,sbin,lib}/.
Debian, with its north of 1000 developers, decided that, despite trying,
it's a lost cause. Do you think Devuan with 5 can do better?
And if all you want is merely separate /usr, the whole extra cost is
installing "tiny-initramfs" which includes a trivial initrd whose features
(and complexity) are limited to:
* CPU microcode
* /usr
* root=UUID
* root on nfs in some configurations
* _very_ minimal module loading, with no real automation. This is usually
inadequate for distribution kernels, you need to recompile your kernel
with required pieces statically.
At least microcode is mandatory on any modern x86 CPUs, or you risk severe
data loss issues that differ by CPU sub-model. You may think that just
because without microcode your machine boots, all is ok. It's not. Even
worse, the documentation for problems fixed by microcode updates is sparse
at best and non-existant in most cases.
Meow!
--
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⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ 1920 nr.11 poz.61): Art.2: An official, guilty of accepting a gift
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ or another material benefit, or a promise thereof, [in matters
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