The systemd maintainers were one of the first ones to put together a technical proposal and do a lot of the implementation work for the UsrMerge, in a way that was reusable across distros.

systemd itself does not depend on being on a UsrMerge'd system, and otherwise, the proposal does not have anything to do with systemd.

From https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor...

"Note that this page discusses a topic that is actually independent of systemd."

You are quoting 2013 doco. systemd has (again) changed since then.

As of 2016, the position is that whilst there is still code in some of the program to handle a split /usr, a significant part of the system (in particular Plug and Play device management) now references /usr and depends from it, to the extent that it is already a requirement that /usr be always present: i.e. that it either be on the root volume or be mounted by /init (on the initramfs) before it invokes systemd.

* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2016-Fe...

Lennart Poettering is indeed now pushing for systemd to impose a similar requirement for /var .

* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2016-Fe...

* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2016-Fe...

Uh, I don't see how this is related to UsrMerge? You can still have separate /usr/bin and /bin directories, you just need to make sure /usr is mounted and accessible during boot. Requiring /usr be available during boot has long been the case for Linux, even before systemd came along.

So, as Linus controls the kernel, Lennart wants to control userspace?

I'm not sure Torvalds care about control either way, he just wants to build a kernel to be proud off.

I have a sneaking suspicion one day systemd is going to try to replace the gnu in gnu/linux.

Why, when they can grab the reins?

Iirc, glibc used to be maintained by a RH guy until he got on so many people's wrong side there was fork made that ran for a number of years until the original was merged into it and the fork renamed.

That one curious definiton of "reusable"...

Systemd walks into a bar, shoots the owner, proclaims it is the new owner, turns the bar into a casino, adds a hotel, a grocery store and an init system.

systemd opens a new bar right next to the most popular bar in town, becomes far more popular (possibly due to better advertising), people complain that their beer tastes worse, and when other people tell them to just go to the original bar, they complain that all their friends are at the new bar.

Also closes the doors on the auto shop next door. Proclaiming you can either go through the bar to get to it, or climb over the barbed wire fence out back to get in.

Others instead use abandoned tools from said auto shop to set up a new one across the road, and get daily ridiculed by the systemd patrons for it.

systemd stopped selling just beer a long time ago. It now sells books, used cars, cement mix and cheap Chinese take away.

Systemd has basically become the enforcement arm of Freedesktop, that in turn is a cover for RH/Fedora running the Linux user space show.