Re: [gentoo-dev] Opinion against /usr merge

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Hobbit <little_hobbit@×××××××.com> wrote:
>> Why should we care about ancient filesystems that didn't supported
>> long paths, and therefore we got stuck with /usr since we didn't
>> wanted to waste another *single* character to make it /user?
>
> Because of it's original name: "UNIX System Resources" (usr).

As William pointed out, this is just another silly rationalization
done after the fact. But, just for argument's sake, lets suppose that
"usr" was named like that because it was the acronym for "UNIX System
Resources".

*Who cares about that now?* It was 43 years ago. My cellphone is
thousands of times faster than the PDP-7 Unix was originally developed
for, and it has millions of times more storage. The length
restrictions imposed on system directories are completely superfluous
now.

All the arguments for keeping /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin
separated are really instances of the Chewbacca defense [1]. They just
don't make any sense.

If upstream projects want to move everything to one location, Gentoo
should follow suit. If enough Gentoo devs (as others had argued) want
to waste their efforts in maintaining this artificial and silly
division between /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin, it is of course
their prerogative. But it must be clear that all the rationale behind
said division was invented after the fact, and (as Rob Landley said in
his email [2]) maintained "for decades by bureaucrats who never
question _why_ they're doing things".

Regards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
[2] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México