Slashdot Mirror
Fedora 17 Released
ekimd writes "Fedora 17 aka "Beefy Miracle" is released. Some of the major features include: ext4 with >16TB filesystems, dynamic firewall configuration, automatic multi-seat, and more. Major software updates include Gnome 3.4, GIMP 2.8, and GCC 4.7. The full feature list can be found here. Personally, I still find Gnome 3 to be an 'unholy mess' so I'm loving XFCE with Openbox."
Unfortunately a lot of linux distro coders don't seem to know where the dividing line between wryly amusing and lame is when it comes to naming releases. The novelty of Ubuntus silly release names wore off for me personally around 5 years ago. All I want a OS so please just stick with the release numbers and don't treat me like a 7 year ago girl looking for a new cuddly toy.
Moving every thing to /usr to make the filesystem more sane.
Meaning that the system no longer supports /usr in a separate filesystem: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken.
Of course, you can still use /usr in a separate filesystem from / if you boot with an initrd, but you now almost need half an operating system (busybox, rescue shell and utilities, perhaps support for lvm and/or RAID) just to boot your real operating system.
Why would you want /usr on a separate filesytem? Perhaps you want it in LVM, so you can resize it easily if necessary (maybe to make room for installing a new desktop environment, for example), but don't want you root file system in LVM. Perhaps you want to periodically fsck /usr on boot, and fall into single-user mode if it fails. Perhaps you want /usr (which is a read-mainly file system) on a small SSD, and all other file systems (which are written to more frequently) on spinning disk storage. Perhaps you want to mount /usr over NFS. Not that I can still see many people doing this but it seems a pity to prevent something that has worked fine in the past - and in these days of "running applications in the cloud" it seems Linux will no longer run applications in the local network (ie. NFS-mounted /usr).
Seriously, read the level of professionalism and maturity on that page. This is the level or maturity to which Linux slowly seems to be sinking. As a long-time Linux user and supporter I find this deeply disappointing.
And what's the reason for all this? Because the udev developers can't wipe their own a{r|s}es, put their house in order, and properly sort out which files go where (or at least sort out what needs to be done to mount any necessary non-root filesystems, mount them, and then continue with any programs/scripts which use them). Instead, all of that gets pushed out to initrd (ie. oh no it's hard, let's give it to someone else to do). Seriously, they're like a bunch of 8-year-olds bragging to their friends that they won't clean their bedrooms, even when mummy thinks they should.