Hello, Neil. On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 11:37:50PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 21:09:38 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > > It's evolution. Linux has for years been moving in this direction, > > > now it has reached the point where the Gentoo devs can no longer > > > devote the increasing time needed to support what has now become an > > > edge case. > > That's precisely the sort of patronising comment I was complaining of in > > my previous paragraph. > In what way is it patronising? It talks down to people. It insinuates that the readers don't have the wherewithal to appreciate that they have been deliberately hurt by _somebody_ rather than something "just happening"; that the idea of an abstraction "moving" is any sort of justification for anything. > > It isn't "evolution". It has been a decision of somebody to move it. > > Who? > It hasn't been a single decision. Somebody, somewhere was the first person to decide to put early boot software into /usr. Others may have followed him, sooner or later, but there was a single person (or perhaps a conspiracy) that did this first. Who? There was no public discussion of this momentous change, not that I'm aware of. Why? > > > > No, this breaking of separate /usr was done by some specific > > > > project, some specific person, even, in a supreme display of > > > > incompetence, malice, or arrogance. How come this project and > > > > this person have managed to maintain such a low profile? There > > > > seems to have been some sort of conspiracy to do this breakage in > > > > secret, each member of the coven pushing the plot until the > > > > damage was irrevocable. Who was it? > > > So which was it, one specific person or a coven of conspirators? > > > This is open source, secret conspiracies don't really work well. If > > > this really was such a bad move, do you really think the likes of > > > Greg K-H would not have stepped in? Or is he a conspirator too? > > I know not how many people were involved. Don't you think it > > noteworthy that we on this group first learnt of the change when it > > had already happened? I have no idea whether people like GK-H would > > have been aware of it either. > I think that is entirely the right time to learn of it. If you want to > know about the devs' discussions before reaching the decision, you > should read gentoo-dev. Until then it was a dev issue, now it is being > implemented it is a user issue. Please be aware the change I was talking about was the decision to break separate /usr, not the Gentoo devs' reaction to this breakage. Why did we only become aware of the decision to break separate /usr after it was too late to do anything about it? How could such a thing happen, if not through conspiracy? > > It [creating an initramfs] may or may not be demanding for any > > particular administrator. It is undoubtedly tedious and time > > consuming. > I disagree, but then I have actually tried doing it. I tried, and gave up after a couple of hours. It was a challenge, but I've grown out of being fascinated by challenges for their own sake. Then I installed dracut, only to find it won't work on my system. I haven't tried genkernel. In the end, with regrets, I took /usr out of my LVM area and put it into a new partition which became the root partition. > This whole discussion reminds me of a conversation I had with a senior > SUSE engineer earlier this year, someone of a similar age to myself. > His comment was along the lines of "I remember when Linux users wanted > the latest bleeding edge, now they complain every time something > changes". The particular change is not progress, it's not a new feature, it's not something useful for users. It's pure breakage for no good reason. If this is what "bleeding edge" now means, no surprise that people complain about it. > -- > Neil Bothwick > A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance from Mom. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
