[systemd-devel] Dropping split-usr/unmerged-usr support

[Luca Boccassi]

On Fri, 2022-04-08 at 00:48 +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Hi Wol,
> 
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 12:02 AM Wol <antlists at youngman.org.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > On 07/04/2022 17:47, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> > > > So, my guess would be that the people who dislike merged-/usr are also
> > > > the ones who dislike systemd, no? i.e. do they really matter if we are
> > > > talking about what to support in systemd? They'd not use our stuff
> > > > anyway, so why bother?
> > 
> > There's probably also a big minority of users (like me) who may be
> > pro-systemd, but run a systemd-hostile distro for reasons that are
> > nothing to do with systemd ...
> > 
> > > There's probably a large overlap between users who don't like systemd
> > > and users who don't like merged-/usr. I would guess we don't have a
> > > critical mass of users/developers running systemd.
> > > 
> > > I could probably force the users who do run systemd to migrate to
> > > merged-/usr, but I don't really see much benefit from that if all
> > > other packages in Gentoo still need to support both configurations.
> > 
> > And I'm sorry if I upset Mike, but I class gentoo as systemd-hostile.
> > It's MUCH easier to install/run Gentoo with OpenRC, systemd isn't that
> > well documented (it's better than it was). There are people who support
> > systemd, but I get the impression it's seen as an unwanted rival to OpenRC.
> 
> I was actually just talking about merged usr with some people in
> #gentoo-dev the other day. I was at first wondering, "hey have we done
> this? what's the hold up?" And the answer seemed to be that nobody has
> really got around to it, and there's not currently a huge champion of
> the project moving it forward. Somebody piped up kind of mildly
> opposed, and then I explained what the general vision for merged usr
> is (hermetic OS in /usr and such), and felt like the reception to that
> was actually somewhat welcoming. Later I posted a link to Lennart's
> latest blog post, and people seemed to think it was cool. Somebody
> mentioned they were going to try out merged usr on Gentoo to see what
> happened, and another person mentioned they were the author of a blog
> post tutorial on how to do it.
> 
> A few conversations over the course of the day in an IRC channel isn't
> necessarily representative of the whole project, but the impression I
> got was way less so about hostility and more so just that nobody has
> gotten around to doing the work and tracking whatever bugs come out of
> it that need to be fixed. It's been started, but seems to have
> fizzled. Maybe the recent discussion here and funny happenings over in
> Debian will inject some life into it. So maybe we'll wind up with
> merged usr after all. No promises, but I think it's much more a matter
> of "when" than "if".
> 
> (My personal 2¢ is that I'd be happy to see systemd help corral us
> stragglers into merged usr, and in the process, drop some complexity
> of its own for supporting unmerged usr.)
> 
> Jason

Any update on this topic? The changes to move to usr-merged have been
merged for OpenMandriva 5.0:
https://github.com/OpenMandrivaAssociation/distribution/issues/2792

This means Gentoo is the last holdout where this isn't possible, even
just optionally. Is it possible to find a Gentoo developer who would
like to take this on? It doesn't have to be universal, having it merged
only for installations running systemd would be perfectly fine. As
mentioned in the thread, the scripts to move an installation forward
and back exist and should be pretty generalistic, and require some
adaptations but no major overhaul.

We'd like to chart a path toward full deprecation at some point in the
future, but we want to make sure that everything that can be done is
done to help all the major distributions move forward as well.

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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