On 24/12/12 23:52, Dale wrote: > Kevin Chadwick wrote: >>> Are there any other cases, apart from emotional attachment based on >>> inertia, where a separate / and /usr are desirable? As I see it, there >>> is only the system, and it is an atomic unit. >> You should really read the thread before posting. >> > I suspect that Alan has. Alan is not known to post without knowing what > he is talking about. > > Dale > > :-) :-) > I used initrd's many years ago, and separate /usr and/ until on a redhat system I rebooted with an out of sequence initrd and kernel on a critical server (the sort of thing that puts your employment at risk when there are 20 odd developers using it ...)
ok, eliminate that point of failure! I then stopped using init*'s until recently and surprise, never had an init* failure until this latest fiasco has caused me to go back to using init*'s. I have had a couple of failures - mostly to do with complexity and trying to juggle more items..and missing something. This is something binary distros are less prone to than gentoo. And my workload/system complexity is now higher as well - all round loss ... As far as the system being "atomic", that has been one of microsofts Achilles heals for many years - so tightly integrated one minor failure takes out everything. I separate / and /usr, its for reliability AND flexibility as far as I am concerned - yes I can change what I do, but why change for something that gives me less? I use LVM on everything except laptops and at least a couple of times a year move things around. I have had major disasters in /usr that were insulated from the rest of the system, I can have a system stay up while I do major changes, so / and /usr as one will be a problem for me. I can see where Lennart and co are coming from, but their target is not reliability, flexibility or long term use ... its run on everything, and throwaway and start again if you want a change - the microsoft approach if you like. It seems to be driven by the cloud and a more throwaway mindset for computing than we are used to, or what gentoo is designed for. Not all the proposed changes are bad ... a read only /usr would be nice, but I object to being forced into what I regard as an unreliable configuration (or use unreliable, crappy software, eg pulse audio!) because of these changes - and for those who say I have a choice ... thats correct, my choice will be eudev. I can see a split coming with two design choices, eudev like with reliably and flexibility at the core for servers, and a more MS like desktop approach for RH and the other big distros as they find themselves being abandoned in the server market. I suspect the thing to watch will be where RH Enterprise goes in its next few versions. So roll on eudev! (and happy Christmas to those celebrating!) BillK
