Am Di., 10. März 2026 um 23:42 Uhr schrieb Duncan <[email protected]>: > > Sam James posted on Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:42:09 +0000 as excerpted: > > > One of the arts of working on Gentoo is balancing many different > > concerns and becoming used to people doing unexpected things, and trying > > to have both reasonable defaults while allowing people to do their own > > thing. > > Just to say, as one such user doing unexpected things (reverse usr-merge > with /usr -> . anyone? of course the not recommended USE="-* ..." is old > news here, as is -* in /etc/portage/profile/packages to kill the entire > @system set (with the full -package list to negate @system before portage > began supporting -*, my comment in the file from the -* simplification > update is dated 2017)). > > Even where not explicitly supported and in fact directly tested against in > global profile scope, like an otherwise systemd profile on reverse usr- > merge, Gentoo on "user did the unexpected" systems is /shockingly/ easy to > maintain locally by a reasonably experienced gentooer, with very few > patches (one to fix that profile test, a couple others to various packages > or their ebuilds where upstream doesn't do the right thing if /usr is a > symlink) actually needed and once they're setup it "just works". > > And what's nice, as long as I've been upfront with my "unexpecteds", my > bug reports haven't been arbitrarily closed or otherwise discriminated > against just because I'm "doing something that's not technically > supported", where in fact that has nothing at all to do with the bug I > actually reported. That wouldn't be the case with all distros, and gentoo > deserves credit for it. > > Then there's the gentoo dev, floppym as it happens, that recently helped > me spot a 20+ year latent local config bug that ultimately traced to the > way I migrated users from Mandrake when I became a Gentooer back in 2004!
Welcome to the club, I migrated from OpenSuSE back in around 2007. > I had /no/ clue, why should I after 20 years of it working without issue, > and the available documentation (beyond the systemd code itself and the > git log of the commit introducing it) simply didn't mention that as a > trigger case and I was /all/ up the wrong tree following some case the > docs did mention but that it turned out was only one case of the two, the > other undocumented, but it all clicked into place when he mentioned the > human user vs. system user config in /etc/login.defs and wondered if my > human user UID might somehow be configured as a system user, and I > recalled worrying about effects some 20 years earlier in that migration, > effects that didn't actually trigger for 20 years! Funny, this sound *a lot* like what I reported here: https://bugs.gentoo.org/970487 > You sometimes read stories about old-timer Linux admins "doing the > impossible" to rescue systems because it turns out it's not impossible > after all if you don't reboot and lose existing running executables still > functional after glibc goes poof in an upgrade gone bad, things like that. > From where I sit floppym just ascended to the same near-$deity status in > the parallel distro-dev space when he made that connection, while surely > having literally no idea I had that sort of migration history... 20 years > ago! Legend indeed! > > A very personal and public THANKS MAN! as he sure deserves it, but despite > the legend, we know distros the size of Gentoo aren't all one person, and > there's thanks to go around for all the other devs (and other testers and > bug reporters and wiki and forums contributors too). Thanks for reporting this - so I'm not the only running hitting strange old bugs I probably introduced myself like 20 years ago... :-D Regards, Kai
