Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 310 posts

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#31

Post by hashhar »

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.

Not everything is a binary.

Also having everything system specific live under a single path means easy backups, easy immutable trees that can be A/B swapped for seamless and online updates with easy rollbacks.

No more wondering where the various tools live since everything lives in /usr/bin and more.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#32

Post by nix23 »

Eduard wrote: post #20
nix23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

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, connections to local "war/land"-lords and the will to take over the country.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#33

Post by rekoil »

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 administrator, as they know their configuration better than any package manager ever can.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#34

Post by forgotmypw17 »

agumonkey wrote: post #14
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…

> 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 think one possible solution is to create systems which are designed to fragment and split up from the beginning.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#35

Post by hyperman1 »

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.

From this comment, I assume you ran testing or unstable.

Stable is great for letting up a server and let it run on its own for years without any maintenance (HN warning: No maintenance is of course never a good idea, but at least Debian made it possible)

Testing ran in update conflicts at least once a month, but it was generally easy to resolve without bricking.

Unstable, well, the name says it all.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#36

Post by pabs3 »

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.

There is a comment on the LWN article about that:

https://lwn.net/Articles/890306/

> First, technical challenges: HURD tried to move from /usr to / and had quite a bit more trouble with it, and that trouble warned against trying it on a larger scale. It's much easier to move from / to /usr than from /usr to / ; fewer things break.

> Second, consolidation: moving into /usr gives us a single directory containing all files managed by the distro / package manager. This has quite a few advantages. It makes sharing /usr among several chroots or containers feasible (one /usr, different /etc and /var). It makes versioning and A/B upgrades (upgrade to new image, fall back to old image if new image doesn't boot) simpler and easier. It makes it easy to lock down /usr with something like fs-verity.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#37

Post by LeoPanthera »

tzs wrote: 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.

Is macOS still UNIX certified? I know old versions used to be. Apple doesn't advertise it anymore.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#39

Post by ssl232 »

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.

Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

#40

Post by pabs3 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

So that is the reason why that weird "unsupported" message showed up at a system I was upgrading some time ago. What I don't get... yes, it may be possible to get a dpkg database into an inconsistent state. But why is everyone hoping on a patch that may or may not appear to prevent these bugs, instead of deriving a way to fix a system with an inconsistent dpkg database?

The patch has already appeared, but it isn't yet in a mergeable state.
Post reply on HN