{"id":146,"date":"2012-03-17T20:07:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-17T20:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/?p=146"},"modified":"2012-03-19T05:41:40","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T05:41:40","slug":"again-on-shoveling-stuff-in-other-people-mouth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/2012\/03\/17\/again-on-shoveling-stuff-in-other-people-mouth\/","title":{"rendered":"Again on shoveling stuff in other people mouth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Again we got a fun thread about having to do some extensive change on perfectly working systems because somebody has a *plan* and you must abide to it.<\/p>\n<p>If before the plan was to have systemd as the true and only init system (on why systemd seems to me a bad idea by itself I&#8217;ll discuss on a later post, possibly after throughly study its latest iteration and comparing it), now the plan is to force people not to have a separate \/usr or use an initramfs with an early boot system because&#8230; &#8220;because doing otherwise is broken and already had been in ages&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>That doesn&#8217;t tell you much and if you have lots of systems running perfectly on a separate \/usr setup and you went that way because it was documented as a best practice, you might feel enraged.<\/p>\n<p>Now, let&#8217;s make clear that there are operating systems that keep everything in \/usr and have next to nothing in \/ (and system that do not have \/usr at all and everything is in \/), you can argue a lot about what&#8217;s the best and why. FreeBSD or Hurd approaches have both interesting perks.<\/p>\n<p>The fact is that *now* you have lots of people with perfectly working system in a configuration somebody decided that is wrong and *unsupportable*.<\/p>\n<p>If you try to dig down a bit more you&#8217;ll discover that the &#8220;brokeness&#8221; is mainly due:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Somebody keen in using a library that traditionally is in \/usr for some fringe feature<\/li>\n<li>Somebody hell bent to use glib everywhere<\/li>\n<li>Somebody wanting to have d-bus running in the early boot phase<\/li>\n<li>Some udev rules using some data that currently resides in \/usr<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All considered forcing people to spend lots of time because somebody might want to use a bluetooth keyboard on early boot (thus requiring bluez, thus requiring d-bus basically because you can&#8217;t use bluez without it) or other non widespread use case is not exactly nice.<\/p>\n<p>Surely trying to get a cleaner layout so we have a bare mountpoint directory, a early boot system in initramfs and the rest of the system cleanly split isn&#8217;t bad by itself and probably it is something I would consider neat.<\/p>\n<p>But you still need to have a good separation between what is early boot and what is not and you need to make sure the boot process doesn&#8217;t get too complex or too tightly coupled with systems that can and will break easily.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m quite happy that <a title=\"Using mdev to replaced udev\" href=\"https:\/\/wiki.gentoo.org\/wiki\/Mdev\">alternatives<\/a> are already almost available for simple systems not needing the additional features requiring those extensive changes.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully somebody will have time to try to add rules marking in udev so complex rules won&#8217;t be triggered when the system isn&#8217;t ready for them and deploys using special layouts could stay supported in a way or another.<\/p>\n<p>In the other news Gentoo had been accepted to participate to the Google Summer of Code and there are <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.gentoo.org\/wiki\/Google_Summer_of_Code\/2012\/Ideas\">two projects<\/a> proposed by me, one is about documenting and if needed extending openrc to be a complete viable alternative to systemd, the other about using containers and qemu-user to have better tools to do cross developement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Again we got a fun thread about having to do some extensive change on perfectly working systems because somebody has a *plan* and you must abide to it. If before the plan was to have systemd as the true and only init system (on why systemd seems to me a bad idea by itself I&#8217;ll &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/2012\/03\/17\/again-on-shoveling-stuff-in-other-people-mouth\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Again on shoveling stuff in other people mouth<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1aGWH-2m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/lu_zero\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}