Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr

[G.Wolfe Woodbury]

On 01/03/2012 10:53 AM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
> On 01/01/12 03:53 AM, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 07:59:47PM -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
>>> The goal is to deprecate /bin, /lib, /sbin and /usr/sbin. My
>>> understanding is that they want to move software that is installed in
>>> /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin. Also, they want to move
>>> everything from /lib to /usr/lib.
>>
>> I don't like this one bit. Things used to be simple with the "split"
>> between
>> /bin and /usr/bin (and its related directories), this isn't going to
>> make it
>> more simple.
>
> I concurr.  I will admit that I've been rather out of touch with what
> other distros are doing (and have been for ~3-4 years), but combining
> everything into /usr/bin just seems plain backwards and I am rather
> shocked that all the distros are moving that way.
>
> Has the LFH been updated??  Googling seems to say no, as the last mod
> seems to have been in 2004...  I know that, technically, these are
> 'userspace' programs in that they aren't kernel-space, but they're
> still 'system' programs so to me it still makes sense for them to be
> on the 'system' side of the filesystem hierarchy, doesn't it?
The problem is that one group of developers is ignoring years of history
and purpose in the separation of /bin and /usr/bin and the ability of
having a separate /usr.  This is in the udev development team and they
/deliberately/ placed or used some programs in /usr/bin instead /bin and
requiring that /usr bee in the root partition.

I will note that the historical separation of the /usr stems from the
days of user home directories being in /usr/home instead of /home.  It
is getting to the point that the security aspects of having a read-only
mount for userspace executables is being overridden by developer fiat.

Lay this one at the RedHat/Fedora developers of udev.

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
aka redwolfe@×××××.com