Re: Duplicate recipes in meta-oe

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 14:43 -0500, Philip Balister wrote:
> On 02/06/2012 10:55 AM, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 15:39 +0000, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> >> I talked to Koen at FOSDEM and apparently he prefers having a symlink rather 
> >> than a copy for the timezone file. I can't express an opinion one way or 
> >> another but it sounds like this one aspect still needs to be resolved - should 
> >> this be selectable?
> > 
> > I guess this is all bound up with the "/usr on a separate partition"
> > thing.  If your position is that the root filesystem is meant to work
> > without /usr mounted then having /etc/localtime be a symlink
> > into /usr/share is probably not going to fly.  Conversely, one were to
> > take the view that any reasonable system in the 21st century is going to
> > have / anḍ /usr on the same device, making it be a symlink would be a
> > fine idea.
> > 
> > I think probably the right answer is to make "1970s-usr" be a
> > DISTRO_FEATURE and then the timezone recipes (and others) can adapt
> > themselves accordingly.
> 
> Does anyone use a system where /usr is on a separate partition?

I'm not aware of any systems that work that way, but I do know that
there have been some patches submitted recently (by Intel folks I think)
to move files around in order to avoid binaries in / linking against
shared libraries in /usr.  Presumably the fact that they're running into
these issues indicates that they've got some systems which are using
that sort of filesystem configuration.

And, given that the idea of a separate /usr does still have some
currency in the Unix world, it doesn't seem unreasonable for oe-core to
support it.  But equally, where that support carries a cost, I think it
would make sense for there to be an easy way for DISTROs to opt out of
it.  Obviously in the case of micro the idea of a separate /usr is
meaningless, but I imagine there are plenty of folks who would want to
keep the /usr filesystem layout but don't need to take special measures
to cope with it being on a different storage device.

p.