From: Didier Raboud Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:45:53 +0000 (+0100) Subject: 914897: Rephrase and merge the points about sharing /usr X-Git-Url: https://git.donarmstrong.com/?p=debian-ctte.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=f120008f6608bfb7b82c36094c997e8b2a4ce02b 914897: Rephrase and merge the points about sharing /usr --- diff --git a/914897_merged_usr/ballot.md b/914897_merged_usr/ballot.md index 9c364d1..970dac0 100644 --- a/914897_merged_usr/ballot.md +++ b/914897_merged_usr/ballot.md @@ -5,9 +5,8 @@ "Merged `/usr`" describes a possible future standard directories scheme in which the `/{bin,sbin,lib*}/` directories have been made superfluous through replacing them by symlinks to their `/usr` equivalents (`/usr/{bin,sbin,lib*}`). The motivation to get Debian systems to converge towards such a scheme is vastly documented elsewhere ([FDO's TheCaseForTheUsrMerge][0], [wiki.d.o UsrMerge][1]) but can be summarized as the following points: -* having separate `/` and `/usr` filesystems has been useful in the past for booting without initramfs onto a minimal root filesystem that carried just enough to mount the `/usr` filesystem later in the boot process. Given the evolution of physical hosts' capabilities, initramfs'es have been default in Debian (and elsewhere) for a long time, and most systems no longer have an intermediate state during boot in which they have only `/`, but not `/usr`, mounted. +* having separate `/` and `/usr` filesystems has been useful in the past for booting without initramfs onto a minimal root filesystem that carried just enough to mount the `/usr` filesystem later in the boot process. Given the evolution of physical hosts' capabilities, initramfs'es have been default in Debian (and elsewhere) for a long time, and most systems no longer have an intermediate state during boot in which they have only `/`, but not `/usr`, mounted. Booting hosts through that intermediate state is not systematically tested in Debian anymore. * another use-case is to be able to share an identical `/usr` over a network link; hence booting an initramfs, mounting a local `/`, then mounting `/usr` over the network. It seems that an initramfs with everything needed to mount a filesystem over a network link directly actually has a smaller footprint. -* booting with `/` only is not systematically tested in Debian anymore; * the packaging infrastructure to install files outside of `/usr` is not standard and represents technical debt: * given its status as remnant "folklore", the distinction between what _needs_ to be shipped in `/` and what can stay in `/usr` is often interpreted arbitrarily; * allowing shipment of identically-named libraries or binaries in different paths can confuse common understanding of paths precedence.