

Fedora considers moving all binaries to /usr/bin/ - sciurus
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Fedora-considers-moving-all-binaries-to-usr-bin-1369642.html

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spitfire
Why not move them all to /bin instead?

/usr is a relic of the times when unix systems were big hulking monsters the
side of fridges. and hard disks the size of washing machines. You kept a
separate /, /var, /usr, /home, etc because you had a lack of space and because
disks kept crashing.

That's no longer the case. Even for the largest 4096cpu numa system you just
throw the entire OS on one partition, with a separate home/data disk.

I'm sure the developers have some neckbeard reason why it has to be /usr and
not / but surely user friendliness is not it.

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makecheck
According to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [1], /bin was originally
designed to hold programs that are "required when no other filesystems are
mounted" or commands "used indirectly by scripts".

Which is a fancy way of saying that you don't want basic functionality to
break just because a mounted volume is unresponsive for some reason.

The /bin versions of programs can also be less powerful (e.g. to keep them
extremely small), although that's unlikely to be an issue these days. For
example, when local disks were small it wasn't unusual to see a bare-bones
/bin version of some program while also having a /usr/bin version that was
capable of large file support and other niceties.

[1] <http://www.pathname.com/fhs/>

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spitfire
I know about all that. You're basically saying "lets stick with the past...
just because.

If you're going to simplify things, do so in a meaningful way and keep up with
the times.

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makecheck
No, that's not what I'm saying.

If you don't separate /bin and /usr, and /usr is a mount and it becomes
unresponsive, how do you log into the machine? Where are the login shells and
basic file management tools to rescue the machine? That problem exists as soon
as you collect tools into one place, whether you choose /bin or /usr/bin to be
that place.

But choosing (only) /bin has an additional problem, which is that you lose the
ability to easily set up mounts. If you have many machines to keep in sync,
they could each have a relatively simple /usr mount; while you could set up
root paths equivalently, you would need more of them: either symlinks or
mounts in several places on all machines that all have to be kept in sync.
That is unnecessarily complicated. The /bin option is only equivalent if you
are in fact dumping everything on the local disk and not using mounts. But
"standard" hierarchy paths should not assume the architecture.

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ryanmarsh
It took them until 2011 to come to this conclusion? It's been needlessly
redundant for far to long.

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rhizome
modular is not the same thing as redundant.

