Re: Duplicate recipes in meta-oe

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 14:48 -0600, Mark Hatle wrote:
> On 2/6/12 2:20 PM, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 14:43 -0500, Philip Balister wrote:
> >> On 02/06/2012 10:55 AM, Phil Blundell wrote:
> >>> 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.
> 
> All existing patches should support / and "usr" being merged as in the micro 
> system design.  If that doesn't work, it's an error in the recipe integration.

Yes, agreed.  I think there are a few bugs in this area right now (and
Mike Crowe sent some patches today for things which got broken in micro
by the recent changes for separate /usr) but broadly speaking you're
right, there is no reason that the two things can't be supported in
parallel.

The point I was trying to make in the text above was that, in cases like
the timezone thing where there is a real cost to supporting a separate
partition for /usr (i.e. making a copy of the file rather than a link)
it would be desirable for there to be a mechanism for DISTROs which
don't need/want that support to avoid taking the hit.

p.