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Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

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Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#291

Post by LeoPanthera »

einpoklum wrote: post #283
LeoPanthera wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the "immutable" parts of UNIX reside in a single directory is often useful. It can be mounted read-only, for example.

/usr/local is not immutable, nor is /usr/share . Also, you could mount / as read-only, and mount the writable parts at different points, or using a UnionFS mount of / .

> /usr/local is not immutable, nor is /usr/share

Not technically, but I've built a number of "appliance" linux systems for clients, and to improve reliability I just make the entire disk read-only with the exception of /home and /var.

The few locations outside of /var that sometimes need to be writable (in particular, /media, /mnt, and sometimes /root) can simply be symlinked into /var.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#292

Post by Dylan16807 »

necovek wrote: post #169
Dylan16807 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, people staying home on polling day doesn't stop them from being part of the majority opinion. If an option gets 60% of the vote, and there are no shenanigans going on, then that option is almost certainly the choice of the majority.

That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;) Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)? Democracy is there to allow us to express a preference. Not voting is exactly that, a preference to not vote, and reasons are certainly various (including the one you mention of supporting the likely winner).

> That's a pretty flexible definition of "choice" ;)

If you choose not to vote, you're putting endorsement toward what everyone else does. If nothing particularly weird or bad is going on, the people not voting should be similar to the people voting.

And you can pretend I said "preference" if you don't like the word choice. Doesn't change my argument.

> Does this also hold if the vote went 51% to 49% (in dual party system)?

No, statistically that's too close. But when you get 60% of a 70% turnout, to reverse that the rest of the population would have prefer to vote about 3:1 in the opposite direction. That's not likely.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#293

Post by usr1106 »

bodyfour wrote: post #278
valleyer wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It exists on BSDs as well. (No idea who did it first.)

I think the first place I saw it was on SunOS 4, but not sure if that was the first. Definitely existed pre-Linux

Around 1990 I used Unix clusters. Not only 68000 Sun mixed with SPARC, but also the other Unix workstation vendors. There was a lot of NFS and also completely diskless machines. /usr/share always meant it's architecture-independent and can be used by machines of any architecture.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#294

Post by zokula »

rektide wrote: post #222
Beltalowda wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't even realize you could use it outside of systemd. I never looked at it in detail, but if something is named systemd- then I think "part of the systemd suite and intended to be used with systemd" is a fairly reasonable assumption. I'd still be hesitant to use it to be honest, as systemd has on several occasions broke people's systems and the response was "you're holding your phone^H^H^H^H^H systemd wrong". We…

Systemd-boot is a dream. Why anyone would tolerate or think grub2 is an acceptable piece of software is beyond my understanding. grub.cfg used to be human editable, but has evolved & morphed into some massive gnarly twisted mess of inscrutible noise that only multiple layers of shell scripts can output. It's become a write-once-read-never disaster. And if i recall it's not even live. You still have to install that co…

No post body was provided.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#296

Post by cerved »

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...

> There is no valid reason anymore to have the operating system spread over multiple hierarchies, it lost its purpose.

I always thought the reason was to categorize binaries which seemed like a valid reason

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#297

Post by f1refly »

raphman wrote: post #26
busterarm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone suffering from systemd, avahi and formerly pulseaudio, I wish Lennart Poettering would care less about workstations.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#298

Post by danmur »

xenadu02 wrote: post #258
Beltalowda wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is because on old Unix systems there frequently wasn't enough space to store /usr on the root disk. It was really a single system in 1971 that kicked off this trend. Originally /usr was for user files, like /home is today (do you'd have /usr/dmr, /usr/ken, etc.) / and /usr were two physical disks, and at some point the / disk (a 1 or 2MB disk IIRC) was full to they put some things from /bin in /usr/bin as a hack…

I am so happy to see that this correct explanation has finally spread. When I first started posting on HN the standard response you would get was the retcon explanation like the parent comment or even more nonsensical ones like "usr == UNIX system resources". At the time cursory searching could not find any actual explanations for this. I started a deep dive into Usenet history and reaching out to folks who knew the…

Your comment makes me want to make up some new nonsense and try to spread it in here. I'll restrain myself though :)

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#299

Post by busterarm »

f1refly wrote: post #297
raphman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone suffering from systemd, avahi and formerly pulseaudio, I wish Lennart Poettering would care less about workstations.

Avahi in particular is classic for how when it works it barely works. If it ever works.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#300

Post by roelschroeven »

caylus wrote: post #269
roelschroeven wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be missing something, because I don't see how a link farm doesn't have the exact same problem. In the case of symlinked directories we have: - the binary lives in /usr/bin/python3 - /bin is a symlink to /usr/bin - /bin/python3 therefore refers to /usr/bin/python3 We can use either /usr/bin/python3 or /bin/python3. In the case of a link farm we have: - the binary lives in /usr/bin/python3 - /bin/python3 is a sy…

> - /bin/python3 is a symlink to /usr/bin/python3 You don't symlink everything in /usr/bin to /bin, just "all regular files that have traditionally been in /bin" (per the article). python3 has not traditionally been in /bin, so /bin/python3 would not be linked.

Ah, yes, thanks, that clears up things.
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