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Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

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21–30 of 310 posts

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#22
post #4

Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. Debian is the very example of it. Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to su…

> tyranny of the minority this is a trendy thing too, very often minorities who felt ignored, are now pushing to get more because of the tiranny of the majority had flaws (but to me is mostly unavoidable due to the natural economies of scale it grants). I don't know how one can design a social system where you balance both in the right way.

> I don't know how one can design a social system where you balance both in the right way.

The central problem is: how shall the "right way" in "both in the right way" even be defined?

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#23
post #5

From the original proposal from 2012 that is linked to in the article: > The primary commercial Unix implementation is nowadays Oracle Solaris. [...] By making the same change in Linux we minimize the difference towards the primary Unix implementation, thus easing portability from Solaris. I wonder what he means by "primary"? I'm reasonably sure than in 2012 OS X was used on more machines than Oracle Solaris.

They're talking about things that distro maintainers care about, namely servers. They are primarily not concerned with your workstation.

Was Solaris more used than HP-UX or AIX in 2012?

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#24
post #4

Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. Debian is the very example of it. Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to su…

[deleted]

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#26
post #5

From the original proposal from 2012 that is linked to in the article: > The primary commercial Unix implementation is nowadays Oracle Solaris. [...] By making the same change in Linux we minimize the difference towards the primary Unix implementation, thus easing portability from Solaris. I wonder what he means by "primary"? I'm reasonably sure than in 2012 OS X was used on more machines than Oracle Solaris.

They're talking about things that distro maintainers care about, namely servers. They are primarily not concerned with your workstation.

Lennart Poettering, the author of the proposal and creator of e.g., systemd, avahi, and pulseaudio, definitely cares about workstations, I'd say.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#27
post #19

Sigh ... gobolinux solved this quite elegantly over 20 years ago, and to this day most folks don't quite grok how simple and elegant their solution was.

Having potentially hundreds of copies of popular shared libraries on disk isn't particularly elegant when you find a bug in those libraries

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#28
post #11

Haven't used debian or debian based systems for many years. They do too much "automagic" things behind your back and thus tend to brick themselves, especially during major updates. Not really sure how they got so popular. The packaging ecosystem is also kinda mess.

Huh? I have the opposite experience. Major upgrades always went flawlessly for me. With the rolling testing-Release on my workstation/laptop, I sometimes run into dependency problems during upgrades. But these can always be solved by a few standard techniques. Not really beginner-friendly, but quite reliable. I have had many more problems when upgrading Ubuntu installations.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#29

I'm surprised that they are pushing to remove /bin and keep /usr/bin. Why not the other way round? Let's keep our binaries out of /usr! (as a first step to remove /usr altogether, since it has a confusing name). I long for a day where PATH=/bin is all we need.

$HOME/bin is useful as well. I like that I can have my own software (that I wrote and compiled) in my home folder and don't need to ask a sys admin to install it for me.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#30
post #5

From the original proposal from 2012 that is linked to in the article: > The primary commercial Unix implementation is nowadays Oracle Solaris. [...] By making the same change in Linux we minimize the difference towards the primary Unix implementation, thus easing portability from Solaris. I wonder what he means by "primary"? I'm reasonably sure than in 2012 OS X was used on more machines than Oracle Solaris.

I presume the intention was to present UNIX server and not the commercial, user-oriented Mac OSX
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