(My best thought so far is having multiple hosts sharing a single /usr over NFS while having per-host root filesystems, but I've never actually seen that done. I've also thought about building a distro that kept its initramfs as root and just mounted everything else into it, but that's even further off the beaten path.)
HPC systems already have better systems for this sort of thing, e.g. Lmod which is modular.
I don’t think it’s a great idea to have /usr itself on NFS, given that things like /usr/bin/env is in most script shebangs and IMO should be stored locally. On some systems, many potential login shells are also stored in /usr/bin and not /bin.
Though part of me agrees that there are reliability concerns to keep in mind, the other part of me still thinks root on NFS is normal, at which point /usr seems rather minor in comparison:) I suspect some of this is cultural or a result of what you're used to.
- broken shell scripts that are hardcoded to "/bin/bash" rather than "/usr/bin/env bash" (this might work for a while, but what happens when they remove the symlink?)
- broken compiles because "/lib" and "/lib64" no longer exist, because of the lack of testing prior to making the change on behalf of users
- broken boots because initramfs (dracut/etc) isn't structured correctly after the change (see lack of testing).
I'm sure there's more but I'm not their personal testing infrastructure. I just want an OS that works without having to fight someone every 3 weeks because "everyone else is doing it, so we should too".
I wouldn't be surprised if they remove the symlink in a year because they consider it useless cruft.
As to testing... yeah obviously this stuff should be thoroughly tested long before it hits users, but I was rather under the impression that it was tested extensively before getting to users. Again, if you've seen actual problems that made it past testing, feel free to point them out since that would greatly strengthen your criticism.
> I just want an OS that works without having to fight someone every 3 weeks because "everyone else is doing it, so we should too".
Are you super committed to Linux OSs? Because you might find the one of the BSDs or illumos more comfortable. Not that they never change (er, well, illumos might not), but at least it's not because of what anyone else does.
(And as an aside: Don't take this as an endorsement of merged usr; I actually prefer a separate /usr myself because I lean towards thinking that it's reasonable to have a read-only root and a rw /usr, or /usr on shared NFS, or any number of other "weird" systems... but I also culturally favor the BSDs, so take that as you will. I just think that if we're going to find fault, we should have the best evidence/arguments possible.)
You know, I would... but Linux has already won the battle... FBSD and Illumos corporate support is already jumping ship to Linux.
Edit: Oh, if you do need Linux, maybe look at Slackware?
A week before that, they upgraded python without bumping all the python packages (kicad comes to mind, edit: ansible deps are frequently broken).
In March, profile 23 wants you to remove your CHOST, which sounds like a good way to break systems, thankfully you can ignore them and keep it set.
Back in February they broke something tied to wine/mono/dotnet without testing it.
Back in January they pretty much made split usr users require an initramfs (I was already using one but I digress).
I'm sure there were some more recent ones, but they like to remove the "news" messages quite frequently and I'm too lazy to dig through git logs.
Python I'll give you, I forgot about 3.12 becoming the default this month, I have an explicit version set in a package.use file that I'll change when I'm ready because I've been burned before. Part of this I blame on Python; overall I've been pretty happy with python on gentoo though, it still lets me have python 2 around for some things. On a Mint laptop I had to install tauthon outside of its package manager.
I read the dracut news item, determined there were no actions required for me (zfs-kmod has the initframfs flag on), and nothing broke. Rereading it again, yeah, it's kind of a sucky change in defaults, but it's clear in what people who might be affected should do.
The profile 23 upgrade is part of the same split/merged usr upgrade, it's clear about the potential scenarios to be worried about (CHOST not being one for most users, a newer gentoo system never set it in the make.conf and my old one's had it commented out for however long.) Note that you could always ignore the profile update for about a year, it's not something that has to be dealt with right away.
For the initramfs thing, it's important to note that it's only required if you have / and /usr on separate filesystems. My old box has them on one filesystem and even after moving it to the un-merged profile 23 I still don't use an initramfs for it. There was originally a news item in 2013, referenced by the item in January of this year, about having them on separate filesystems being unsupported without initramfs. I think 11 years for end-users that could have been impacted by this to deal with it is more than reasonable.
Glancing through the news list, the one on 2024-02-01 about grub updates resulted in a broken boot for me, I think I should have just ignored it. The item last December about CUPS didn't break anything but I can see how it easily could if ignored. I'm still annoyed that they've dropped layman but layman still works as-is. Overall, I do think things have been somewhat less stable in the last 4 years. Even just on news items (that could have impacted my old box, anyway) there's been 49 since 2020, while in the 10 years of April '09 to 2019 there were 81, though 2023 only had 3 items.
There is of course some fighting, and sometimes some turbulent periods of more frequent fighting, but it's still not every few weeks or even months and a lot of the time the fight is yours to accept/decline at your choosing.
