this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Split-/usr on Linux became so broken, that even Gentoo maintainers decided they can't fix it (gitweb.gentoo.org)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git/tree/2013/2013-09-27-initramfs-required/2013-09-27-initramfs-required.en.txt?id=a79dd69b0cca439bc0c483c9193c79e0554819d0

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[–] nyan 24 points 5 months ago

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that's the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t know if this is really a “so broken” instance. /bin and /usr/bin (or sbin) have never been well separated, to the point where many distributions just symlink to /usr anyway. If you don’t want an initramfs to provide binaries you need them somewhere accessible.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

/bin and /usr/bin (or sbin) have never been well separated, to the point where many distributions just symlink to /usr anyway.

They were(see FHS) and you show exactly how broken it became.

/usr supposed to have files that are needed only after first part of boot procees before mounting filesystems.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

They were defined sure, but without distribution adherence they weren’t actually, this has been the case for a long time. Out of all the distributions, Gentoo is probably one of the most sensitive to this issue since most others have used initramfs or initrd for decades and Gentoo has always made it optional.

If the post was about FHS adherence I’d agree more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

that was a workaround, not needed anymore, so let them die

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And use bigger bandaid. Meanwhile initramfs and split-usr would greatly complement each other.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

of course not, any program that has it own install script install it on /bin because it's easier, and why need that in a early boot, what's the difference, was always a workaround, wasn't needed to complement anything before, and don't need anything now

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm curious why the separation between these still exists, because a bunch of distributions symlink all of these to /usr/bin either way

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Think about booting over network. Or having /usr on another drive. Including even network drive. Think about ~~dumb terminals~~(wrong cetury) thin clients. For example they can use small disk to quickly boot wihout downloading kernel and initramfs and use NFS for /usr and /home.

[–] pastermil 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

These days, AFAIK network boot is done thru initramfs. It loads rootfs in most cases I've seen tho.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

True, network boot is not best example. Shared /usr is much better one. For example if you are school that wants to buy 100 thin clients for very cheap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It exists because, long ago in a galaxy far far away, a sysadmin ran out of space on a drive. The system was split between two 10MB(?) drives, one was / and one was mounted at /usr, for User data. They moved some of the programs to a folder for a dummy user, /usr/bin, and put that in everybody's PATH.

Everybody kept on doing things that way ever since. Social momentum is funny that way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Alpine still keeps /bin and /usr/bin separated.

And iirc the next fedora release will finally unify everything under /usr/bin.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And iirc the next fedora release will finally unify everything under /usr/bin.

On my current Fedora 40 install /bin is already a symlink to /usr/bin