5 ms·

Your arguments are irrelevant nowadays. If my filesystem gets corrupted, I boot into a live cd, just like everybody does. With btrfs and integrated parity, ch

by madez 11y ago

Your arguments are irrelevant nowadays. If my filesystem gets corrupted, I boot into a live cd, just like everybody does. With btrfs and integrated parity, checksums, cow and scrubbing on the horizon filesystem reliability is only a minor thing to care about. With subvolumes we can snapshot as many things atomically as we want. Simlicity is now what trumps your arguments overwhelmingly. The filesystem hierarchy has to be intuitive, consistent and simple, which it is currently not.

thaumaturgy 11y ago
There was a major ext4 bug just earlier this year that caused data loss for some folks: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785672 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785672 Booting a LiveCD would not have fixed affected partitions. You're not the first on HN to say in so many words that the sometimes expensive lessons I've learned over 30 years of computing are suddenly irrelevant now. I used to argue that, but I don't see much point to it anymore.
- madez 11y ago
  One of your arguments was to put /bin and /sbin onto a seperate partition so that if something happens, it’s unlikely that /bin and /sbin are affected. In reality however, nobody cares about /bin and /sbin at all. Another argument was more fine grained permission control. You can do that by other means, for example with subvolumes. So, after all, possible corruptions are not alleviated by complex partition struture, or only with a bad trade-off for complexity. Instead, do backups. Easy and reliable. Everbody is happy, without many partitions. Simplicity is crucial and it's one thing the free software ecosystem is consistently getting wrong. I see it as the major showstopper for many people to use it more intensively. The filesystem hierarchy is just one culprit, but a fundamental one. Take a look at at some fundamental pure mathematics lectures or books. You can immediately see that this was designed to be as easy as possible. Software must be the same.
felixgallo 11y ago
I boot my rackmount servers in a cage at the dc using a what now?
- madez 11y ago
  Your use case is a tiny minority which doesn’t provide enough justification to increase the complexity of the default, for complexity being _very_ expensive.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And this is why Linux user space is going down the tube. Basically that exact capability is why people adopted Linux in the first place to run the servers that run the net. I don't see how having a / that can get up and running even when the larger system housed in /usr and such is down for the count, is anything more complex that the piles of VMs and containers that is being advocated today.
    - madez 11y ago
      You are free to set up your system as you wish. I also don’t advocate for removing options. I’m asking for a simple default. Simplicity is very important. If you can’t explain what you are doing to your parents, it is not yet simple enough. Don’t misunderstand simplicity for triviality for they are not the same. We need to make non-trivial problems simple.
    - spacemanmatt 11y ago
      I run a multiuser shell system for hosting tmux/ssh/irc type usage. It's limiting but it's a labor of love for friends. For anything that matters I use a modern (piles of VMs and containers!) design.
  - felixgallo 11y ago
    Global desktop PC shipments in 2015: ~136mm (http://www.statista.com/topics/1070/pcs/ http://www.statista.com/topics/1070/pcs/) Linux desktop penetration: ~1.33% (http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=Mac,Windows,Linux&sample=36&qpsp=2015&qpnp=6&qptimeframe=Y http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....) 1.3% * 136mm = 1.77mm Let's ignore Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on, each of whom are by themselves rumored or reported to have over a million computers in their DCs. Let's further ignore the long tail of the second tier of providers, who are thousands in number and have merely hundreds of thousands of computers each in their DCs. Let's go on to ignore all of the self serve corporations in the hundreds of thousands of data centers across the world, running Linux or a derivative on thousands to hundreds of computers each. Let's also ignore all the routers, switches, file servers, and miscellaneous other networking equipment running Linux or a derivative. Let's further ignore all of the televisions, media players, microwaves, appliances, and other consumer goods running Linux or a derivative. Let's look only at Android phones, which run an embedded derivative of Linux. The phone market shipped 341.5 million year over year in 2015 Q2 (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). Android had an 82.8% marketshare, so that's 282.77mm. The number of linux computers that have the ability to boot "a live cd" is 6 thousandths (.6%) of one segment of one part of the linux embedded and server market. Linux on the desktop has not only been dead for the last 18 years, it's barely a rounding error on a single segment of a single part of the embedded and server market. By the way, "the complexity of the default" has been fine for over 30 years, and it's still fine. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not the right answer.
digi_owl 11y ago
> If my filesystem gets corrupted, I boot into a live cd, just like everybody does. And that is what makes someone take the road trip to the server farm at 2am because a ge-wiz dev thought the exact same and never considered a "rescue" mode with network capability.

by madez 11y ago

thaumaturgy 11y ago

There was a major ext4 bug just earlier this year that caused data loss for some folks: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785672 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785672 Booting a LiveCD would not have fixed affected partitions. You're not the first on HN to say in so many words that the sometimes expensive lessons I've learned over 30 years of computing are suddenly irrelevant now. I used to argue that, but I don't see much point to it anymore.

madez 11y ago
One of your arguments was to put /bin and /sbin onto a seperate partition so that if something happens, it’s unlikely that /bin and /sbin are affected. In reality however, nobody cares about /bin and /sbin at all. Another argument was more fine grained permission control. You can do that by other means, for example with subvolumes. So, after all, possible corruptions are not alleviated by complex partition struture, or only with a bad trade-off for complexity. Instead, do backups. Easy and reliable. Everbody is happy, without many partitions. Simplicity is crucial and it's one thing the free software ecosystem is consistently getting wrong. I see it as the major showstopper for many people to use it more intensively. The filesystem hierarchy is just one culprit, but a fundamental one. Take a look at at some fundamental pure mathematics lectures or books. You can immediately see that this was designed to be as easy as possible. Software must be the same.

felixgallo 11y ago

I boot my rackmount servers in a cage at the dc using a what now?

madez 11y ago
Your use case is a tiny minority which doesn’t provide enough justification to increase the complexity of the default, for complexity being _very_ expensive.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And this is why Linux user space is going down the tube. Basically that exact capability is why people adopted Linux in the first place to run the servers that run the net. I don't see how having a / that can get up and running even when the larger system housed in /usr and such is down for the count, is anything more complex that the piles of VMs and containers that is being advocated today.
  - madez 11y ago
    You are free to set up your system as you wish. I also don’t advocate for removing options. I’m asking for a simple default. Simplicity is very important. If you can’t explain what you are doing to your parents, it is not yet simple enough. Don’t misunderstand simplicity for triviality for they are not the same. We need to make non-trivial problems simple.
  - spacemanmatt 11y ago
    I run a multiuser shell system for hosting tmux/ssh/irc type usage. It's limiting but it's a labor of love for friends. For anything that matters I use a modern (piles of VMs and containers!) design.
- felixgallo 11y ago
  Global desktop PC shipments in 2015: ~136mm (http://www.statista.com/topics/1070/pcs/ http://www.statista.com/topics/1070/pcs/) Linux desktop penetration: ~1.33% (http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=Mac,Windows,Linux&sample=36&qpsp=2015&qpnp=6&qptimeframe=Y http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....) 1.3% * 136mm = 1.77mm Let's ignore Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on, each of whom are by themselves rumored or reported to have over a million computers in their DCs. Let's further ignore the long tail of the second tier of providers, who are thousands in number and have merely hundreds of thousands of computers each in their DCs. Let's go on to ignore all of the self serve corporations in the hundreds of thousands of data centers across the world, running Linux or a derivative on thousands to hundreds of computers each. Let's also ignore all the routers, switches, file servers, and miscellaneous other networking equipment running Linux or a derivative. Let's further ignore all of the televisions, media players, microwaves, appliances, and other consumer goods running Linux or a derivative. Let's look only at Android phones, which run an embedded derivative of Linux. The phone market shipped 341.5 million year over year in 2015 Q2 (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). Android had an 82.8% marketshare, so that's 282.77mm. The number of linux computers that have the ability to boot "a live cd" is 6 thousandths (.6%) of one segment of one part of the linux embedded and server market. Linux on the desktop has not only been dead for the last 18 years, it's barely a rounding error on a single segment of a single part of the embedded and server market. By the way, "the complexity of the default" has been fine for over 30 years, and it's still fine. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not the right answer.

digi_owl 11y ago

> If my filesystem gets corrupted, I boot into a live cd, just like everybody does. And that is what makes someone take the road trip to the server farm at 2am because a ge-wiz dev thought the exact same and never considered a "rescue" mode with network capability.