Introducing /run

Posted Mar 30, 2011 16:55 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Introducing /run by handock
Parent article: Introducing /run

> And the developers applaud and follow him like mindless sheep.

I hope so. Linux is better because of it.

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Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 2:06 UTC (Thu) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link] (4 responses)

>> And the developers applaud and follow him like mindless sheep.
>
> I hope so. Linux is better because of it.

No. This is just change for it's own sake like a lot of the stuff that's been going on lately (Wayland, Unity). This seems to be about people's aesthetic preferences and really has little functional value.

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 2:18 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Disagree completely. It's demonstrably false that it's just "change for it's own sake"; read the comments in this read regarding read-only /.

I'd love to be able to run with / being on read-only media in some scenarios. (I'm a paranoid guy. :)

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 4:44 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

yeah there is no practicle reason for wanting to reduce the size of tmpfs and to stop random non-device crap being written in /dev.

Why don't you start jumping up and down about all the stuff that broke the unix best practices that necessitated /run ?

Introducing /run

Posted Mar 31, 2011 5:06 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> No. This is just change for it's own sake like a lot of the stuff that's been going on lately (Wayland, Unity). This seems to be about people's aesthetic preferences and really has little functional value.

Well change is good. It is just people doing their best to make something they like better.

And aesthetics do matter. Isn't that part of the hacker ethos? There is certain aesthetic quality to the design of Unix, right?

The world moves on, things change, people adapt.

Like this /run thing...

Were not people flipping apeshit just a while ago about how SystemD flashed a warning that having a separate /usr is a unsupported configuration?

And how, in reality, that was not a supported configuration for years and years. It can work, but it's not guaranteed to work. You can make it work even if it didn't... but it would require inelegant solutions.

But now when the same guy says that we should have a /run directory so that programs always have a place to store their runtime temporary files... so people can have /var mounted on a different partition without a bunch of ugly hacks going on in /dev/.??* files... now all of a sudden that is a horrible suggestion.

What is the alternative? Just keep shoving more and more information into /dev/.??* because that is the only file system that developers know will be there at immediate boot-up?

Maybe if we modify things a bit and try to improve the system then we can finally have a system that really does support things like read-only root and remote-mount /usr/* directories.

Oh. And Unity is not-so-hot. Ubuntu is pushing too hard on it and it needs to wait till next release. I tried using it for a few weeks, but it's just not a very pleasant experience.

So I ditched Ubuntu and went with Fedora 15 Alpha. I tried to go back to Debian first, but I couldn't get it to work the way I wanted. Gnome 3 is just not well enough put together for Debian yet.

Fedora is FANTASTIC. Gnome 3 has been stable for me. Open source Gallium Radeon drivers are fast and can actually play most games now. The bug track stuff that Fedora has built in to help file bug reports on application crashes is super-duper cool. Hopefully it won't take much longer to get codec acceleration (maybe 8-10 months if things go well) and then I would be very happy.

I wouldn't be so negative about change if I was you. It has it's ups and downs. Ideally it will have more ups.

Introducing /run

Posted Apr 1, 2011 3:59 UTC (Fri) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]

There's always slackware if you want to live in 1999 Linuxland. Or NetBSD, perhaps.