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

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@×××××.com> wrote:
> I don't mind the merge of /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin;
> moreover, I want an even more radical change:
>
> /usr -> /System
> /home -> /Users
> /etc -> /Config

This would be a terrible idea, IMO. If you can rationalize this, why
not any of these?

/etc -> /設定
/etc -> /组态
/etc -> /組態
/etc -> /configuración

Codes (and things like 'usr', 'etc' and 'home' are codes) may not be
the most intuitive, but they have roughly the same difficulty
regardless of your source language.

Worse, I think /home to /Users is an *egregiously* poor choice; any
native English speaker who has rudimenatry (or even intimate)
knowledge of how things previously worked would be very likely to
confuse /Users with the historical /usr.

> 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?
>
> Let that silly legacy stuff die. Keep symbolic links to the old
> directories for compatibility reasons, if you want to (modern software
> should not need it anyhow), and move on. Remember /usr/X11R6? We kept
> a /usr/X11R6 -> /usr link for years. Do you miss it?

The longer something exists, the more things like procedures and best
practices grow to depend on it both explicitly and implicitly. There's
a lot of stuff out there which assumes the existing structure. Stuff
that people don't necessarily even think about any more, because it
just works.

Grossly changing the filesystem layout does worse than make
maintenance of known software more difficult, it changes a lot of
longstanding assumptions for ancient, still-functional code written
ages upon ages ago, and it makes it that much more difficult to
install new software onto production systems which have been running
for decades.

That's the legacy of being a UNIX-alike. Heck, I know a local guy who
has to struggle to get newish versions of Python, CUPS and other
things onto an AIX box, because those are the tools he has to use to
satisfy company needs. Based on IRC conversations, it sounds like he
spends at least 5% of his time (that *I* know about, anyway) trying to
wedge new software into old systems.

Change almost always breaks more things than you expect, because you
only expect the things you remembered to consider, not the things you
forgot existed.

Ugh. I've gone offtopic. This email went from having anything to do
with udev to being about filesystems layouts.

-- 
:wq