Ok, so the day has come. On the context of getting "/usr merge" on alpine, I am going to try update the FHS.
9 years after it was updated, big parts of it are out-of-sync with the current Linux distro conventions.
We (@postmarketOS) already pinged the @linuxfoundation about it in February, and their suggestion was to get somebody interested to do the work. So let's start that process now! Since the FHS mailing list seems defunc (I subscribed and sent an email in February that never got added to the archive), please send me an email at pabloyoyoista@postmarketos.org so we can get a list of people to start discussing the process
[#]linux #distros #debian #fedora #alpinelinux #postmarketOS #systemd
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The fact that a small, young distro like postmarketOS is trying to do this work seems a bit odd. I would have expected others with a lot more experience and leverage in the community to have jumped on updating it when they made the "/usr merge" compulsory. But since that didn't happen, we'll do our best.
The worst possible outcome is we spend some time, are unsuccessful getting enough traction to get the standard updated, and then we collectively agree the standard does not reflect reality and is dead. Let's hope we don't get there.
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@pabloyoyoista Great, best of luck!
If anyone else (like me) does not know what FHS means - it stands for Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
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@linmob Thanks for the pointer!
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@pabloyoyoista Maybe you can also find a few contributers via https://uapi-group.org/
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@gromit Thanks! Yes, we will contact key people from it
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@pabloyoyoista I think the best way to go about is to post in the discussions there 😊
https://github.com/orgs/uapi-group/discussions
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@pabloyoyoista As you said. The FHS seems somewhat defunct.
systemd documents the "new" FHS most distros (through systemd) have been following in recent years: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/file-hierarchy.html. I think this is an appropriate starting point
The appropriate standards body to do this through is probably the UAPI Group: uapi-group.org. It's a standards body created to standardize OS-plumbing-level things (bootloader config, discoverable partitions, etc) across distros.
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@pabloyoyoista Finally, the FHS probably isn't as relevant today as it once was.
If you're an app dev, you can package up a Flatpak (where FHS need not apply) instead of making dozens of distro packages.
If you're a library upstream, you already have to expose configure knobs for paths because each distro does a slightly different thing.
If you're a distro packager, you've already been doing your own thing forever. Again, FHS need not apply
It's a useful convention, but that's it IMO
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@AdrianVovk the UAPI group certainly feels like the place where it should end up!
Surely the relevance of different things change with time. But we've seen ourselves at pmOS and others in other distros referencing the FHS repeatedly. And I've used it extensively as a sysadmin through the years. Of course, the more outdated it is, the least relevant it becomes too. But the idea is to try be part of the solution to that problem :)
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@pabloyoyoista my take on it as a fellow distro maintainer is that we're all stretched so thin with trying to put out fires and deal with both unhappy users and unhappy upstreams that nobody has really had the energy to try to update it.
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@vimproved that's a shame. But that's where collaboration should help, I guess?
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@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation Strangely, this interests me, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
Are you talking about something like https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge?
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@jens we will have to do that in alpine. Help with that is welcomed, but the core of the issue is to get the standard updated: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml
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@pabloyoyoista Yeah, I know the FHS. It's more that I don't really get the motivation behind it.
More precisely, I don't particularly care if distros do this merge. But I do care deeply that no standard requires it.
Over the decades I've worked with plenty of systems where keeping what is available at (early) boot time as small as possible, and rely on more binaries only later.
An updated FHS should not remove this separation, though I don't mind supporting a merge, of course.
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@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation Good luck! This work will be very valuable - I love consistent standards and I'm sure it will also fix many incompatibilities in the progress.
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@pabloyoyoista this feels like a nerdsnipe. I'd be curious.
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@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation Interesting. @michelin and I have also been interested from the @fedora side.
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@Conan_Kudo @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation @fedora yes please. I will email later today
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@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation I do not have time to participate in detail but I have a request to make with my Autoconf upstream maintaner hat on:
In the revised standard, please make a hard requirement (MUST, in the sense of RFC 2119) for executable shell scripts to continue using #! /bin/sh and not #! /usr/bin/sh as their first line, and for executable scripts that use the env hack to use #! /usr/bin/env and not #! /bin/env. Please also make a requirement for conforming programs to look up all other executables via $PATH instead of under any particular absolute path, to the maximum extent possible.
These are vital for continued cross-compatibility with the BSD phylum; last I checked there was no intention of ever going to a "merged /usr" layout on that side of the fence.
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@zwol @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation thanks for the thoughts! If you really care about something, please follow along the process and propose requests once there's a place for it. I'm afraid I'll completely loose track of mastodon comments 😅
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@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation understood, email sent
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