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Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

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Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#111

Post by dotancohen »

nix23 wrote: post #32
Eduard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments section is only two levels deep and we have already arrived at Godwin's law.

I don't compare you with a nazi, but you should understand that minority's can take over a country, that's what the nazis did but also the communists in romanov-russia...china is more complicated. It's something completely different, but maybe "nazi" is a red flag for you in comments...because not comfy. EDIT: And more actual, the Taliban's in Afghanistan, an absolute minority but the one with weapons, training, conn…

Or the Alawites in Syria, or the Europeans in 18th century North America, or the Mongols, or a hundred other examples. There's a line somewhere between less-violent "minorities taking over a country" and more violent Mongol-like "taking over", but I would say that the situation of a minority group seizing power is not significantly less common than of a majority group seizing power.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#112

Post by goodpoint »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #84
sph wrote: 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…

Everything that works well is structured like a monarchy. Maybe the west shouldn't be trying so hard to export democracy?

The biggest wars and massacres in human history always involved some monarchy/dictatorship.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#113

Post by darrenf »

nickcw wrote: post #89

Just in case anyone is wondering why we had (or used to have) /bin and /sbin directories as well as /usr/bin /usr/sbin here is my understanding of it. It is because on old Unix systems there frequently wasn't enough space to store /usr on the root disk. Therefore /usr was a separate disk which might not be available during boot. This meant that you needed to put all the binaries you needed for boot in /bin and /sbin…

There was a long thread about this 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#114

Post by dotancohen »

mwcampbell wrote: post #109
dotancohen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first experience with someone in your position was Geordi LaForge. I found it so inspiring how he overcame - though technology - his blindness and how his innovation became central to fulfilling his craft's mission and often securing the safety of its crew. I often wondered what would have become of him had he been born in an earlier age, without the technology to provide him with an alternative high-bandwidth, lo…

> My first experience with someone in your position was Geordi LaForge. I found it so inspiring [...] To be clear, that's a fictional character in a fictional future that may or may not ever come. Sure, we can use assistive technology, e.g. screen readers, to enable us to work. But with our current technology, that requires cooperation from developers of platforms, applications, websites, etc., and as I said in anoth…

Yes, Roddenberry used his fictional future to show us what our future could be. That was the point that I was trying to make without being too explicit - that could in fact be our future. If we choose it.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#115

Post by goodpoint »

rekoil wrote: post #33
Cloudef wrote: 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.

What killed Debian for me was when doing an upgrade of Apache and PHP it automatically restarted Apache temporarily without PHP configured, then the upgrade of PHP failed and left Apache running completely without PHP support for a while until someone noticed, and Apache happily kept serving .php files as text/plain during this time. A package manager should in my opinion leave daemon stopping/starting to the adminis…

You can disable automatic daemon restarting in Debian.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#116

Post by mwcampbell »

andrepd wrote: post #100
mwcampbell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need to meet like a business. It is or should be like a club run for the benefit of the members: let's create good conditions for people. We can tolerate a bit of complexity and diversity. Individuals and groups (including businesses) do have goals though, and it seems natural that some of them feel that they're being thwarted in their pursuit of…

"Poor businesses forced to build ramps and make their websites screenreader-accessible" seems a distinctly weird take to me. If we're no longer taking even the slightest bit of care towards looking after our fellow Man then it's not a world worth living to me. EDIT: It's also not just a "tiny minority", about 13% of the world's population have serious vision impairment. Making streets, businesses, services, products…

One can only be exposed to so much backlash from seemingly reasonable people before wondering if they're actually right.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#117

Post by erik_seaberg »

mekster wrote: post #65
enriquto wrote: post #17

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.

Why not read the reasoning once? https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor...

> What changes is simply that you need to boot with an initrd that mounts /usr before jumping into the root file system.

> On Fedora the root directory contains ~450MB already. This hasn't been minimal since a long time[…]

> There is no way to reliably bring up a modern system with an empty /usr.

These seem like workarounds for self-inflicted Fedora problems. Having a known-good /bin from boot time seems strictly better than an extra copy of some of /bin in a ramdisk that almost nobody works with because it’s quickly thrown away.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#118

Post by 0des »

hoseja wrote: post #75
sph wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am of the opinion that BDFL style governance is best in software. In the real world the problem is a bit more hairy, but if you have an issue with a tyrant in open source, you can just fork the project. A BDFL solves the bureaucracy problem (they mandate, everybody implements) and the big ego problem (the biggest ego is at the top by definition). Also BDFL can have vision, something a committee will never have. In…

What does Jobs have to do with software.

No post body was provided.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#119

Post by 0des »

jorvi wrote: post #110
scandox wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all I think Eugenics would/will quickly lead to something akin to runaway selection: people will make increasingly absurd decisions mainly driven by status markers / perceptual drift and the human race will breed itself into some mad corner. So I don't believe Eugenics is ever going to do what even its most ardent supporters imagine. Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need…

You could just have the government mandate a test, and any embryo that has markers (genetic or otherwise) of a chronic debilitating condition is not allowed to be brought to term. If parents do choose this, the kid will fall outside of the healthcare system for its condition and parents will have to foot the entire ongoing bill. Eugenics does not automatically mean we all customize our embryos to be 2m tall geniuses…

I'd probably have a beautiful full head of hair still...

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#120

Post by jeffparsons »

ssl232 wrote: post #39
sph wrote: 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…

How much of Python's success is down to the BDFL(-delegate) approach of governance? It seems a lot of projects have adopted it and Python's PEP system for managing new features. I wonder if Debian could use a similar sort of elected presidential system.

I can't deny Python's success, but I wouldn't hold it up paragon of change management, either. 13+ years after the release of Python 3 and 2+ years after 2.7's EOL, I'm still dealing with Python dependencies that don't work on Python 3 because maintainers preferred to pretend that Python 3 wasn't happening and that Python 2.7 would be around forever.

It's confusing as heck trying to figure out what I should even expect to work, because some authors treat it as obvious that their code will work on both Python 2 and Python 3, while other authors treat it as obvious that they still only support Python 2.

I've had a lot less trouble with merged /usr. I guess it's not a fair comparison, but it does suggest to me that there are more important factors at play.

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