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

[Mike Gilbert]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 9:41 AM Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I'll work on a migration path for Gentoo systems running systemd. I
think we could get it done before the end of the year.