Re: [PATCH 1/4] gnu: Separate util-linux into three packages.

[Ludovic Courtès]

John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 12:59:50PM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>      John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:
>      
>      > On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 11:55:13PM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>      
>      [...]
>      
>      >      > Also, it would only work if nfs-utils was installed in the 
> current system profile,
>      >      > which need not be the case.  It might be installed only in 
> root's profile or I might 
>      >      > want to see what happens if I use an alternative version of 
> nfs-utils.
>      >      
>      >      That ???mount??? can invoke ???mount.nfs??? looks like a 
> convenience to me, not
>      >      something highly critical.
>      >
>      > Well it's critical if "mount -a" is going to work, and thus if NFS 
> filesystems (such as /home in
>      > many networks) can be automatically mounted at boot time.
>      
>      GuixSD doesn???t use the ???mount??? command to mount file systems so 
> that
>      shouldn???t have any influence.
>
> What does it use instead?

The ‘mount’ system call; see (gnu build file-systems).

>      1,093 packages depend on util-linux.  Per the strategy outlined at
>      <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-10/msg00933.html>
>      this could go to ???staging??? but I think this should go to 
> ???core-updates???
>      which we???ll reopen to fix <http://bugs.gnu.org/24703>.
>
> I'm irritated that util-linux has so many, completely unrelated things in it. 
>  For example
> it contains the "mount", "cal" and "col" commands.    Regardless of the NFS 
> issues, I 
> suggest we consider separating it anyway, into several packages all deriving 
> from the common
> source.

The strategy is to stick to what upstream does, in general, and I’m not
convinced splitting would buy us much (in terms of disk usage, for
instance.)

Ludo’.