On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Nelson Marques nmo.marques@gmail.com wrote:

2012/1/27 Greg KH gregkh@suse.de:

...

Here's a good document describing the why behind this type of change:  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

It's something that I think we should push for 12.2 if at all possible.

thanks,

greg k-h

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/opt should be banned as well :)

NM

This would cause a problem for KDE3 packages, which are installed in /opt to avoid conflicts with their KDE4 equivalents.

-Todd

Le vendredi 27 janvier 2012 à 11:34 +0100, Ruediger Meier a écrit :

On Friday 27 January 2012, Greg KH wrote:

...

Here's a good document describing the why behind this type of change:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerg e

I also like moving to /usr/. But I hope we are not merging bin and sbin. That link aboves says nothing about this but at the end it refers to a Poettering email where he wants to merge bin and sbin too.

From what I understand, they didn't merge sbin and bin in Fedora (don't

know if it is a definitive state or not).

On 1/27/2012 7:48 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:

Greg KH wrote:

...

Here's a good document describing the why behind this type of change: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

It's something that I think we should push for 12.2 if at all possible.

Great idea. Here's hoping that it's going forward!

Joachim

I pretty much agree with the goal too but this kind of speech makes me want to reject it just because it makes me wonder how much of the driving force is really technical:

"Not implementing the /usr merge in your distribution will isolate it from upstream development. It will make porting of packages needlessly difficult, because packagers need to split up installed files into multiple directories and hard code different locations for tools; both will cause unnecessary incompatibilities. Several Linux distributions are agreeing with the benefits of the /usr merge and are already in the process to implement the /usr merge. This means that upstream projects will adapt quickly to the change, those making portability to your distribution harder."

Every distro has a /usr/bin and so the mere existence of a /bin in no way forces an upstream coder to care about it and in no way impacts "portability to your distribution" or "isolate it from upstream development" ...

That kind of writing makes me think the author just has his idea he wants to push and defend and has more passion than sense.

On 1/28/2012 7:04 AM, Brian K. White wrote:

On 1/27/2012 7:48 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:

...

Greg KH wrote:

...

Here's a good document describing the why behind this type of change: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

It's something that I think we should push for 12.2 if at all possible.

Great idea. Here's hoping that it's going forward!

Joachim

I pretty much agree with the goal too but this kind of speech makes me want to reject it just because it makes me wonder how much of the driving force is really technical:

"Not implementing the /usr merge in your distribution will isolate it from upstream development. It will make porting of packages needlessly difficult, because packagers need to split up installed files into multiple directories and hard code different locations for tools; both will cause unnecessary incompatibilities. Several Linux distributions are agreeing with the benefits of the /usr merge and are already in the process to implement the /usr merge. This means that upstream projects will adapt quickly to the change, those making portability to your distribution harder."

Every distro has a /usr/bin and so the mere existence of a /bin in no way forces an upstream coder to care about it and in no way impacts "portability to your distribution" or "isolate it from upstream development" ...

That kind of writing makes me think the author just has his idea he wants to push and defend and has more passion than sense.

Also their facts are a little, well, iffy at least.

"Myth #6: A split /usr is Unix “standard”, and a merged /usr would be Linux-specific

Fact: On SysV Unix /bin traditionally has been a symlink to /usr/bin. A non-symlinked version of that directory is specific to non-SysV Unix and Linux."

Weelll...

# uname -a SCO_SV unix2003 3.2 5.0.7 i386

Sco openserver is sysv 3.2 and rather widely installed.

/bin and /usr/bin a real directories. The actual binaries are mostly symlinks, but NOT to the same directory as each other.

Basically most of the stuff in /bin and /usr/bin are symlinks to /opt/K/SCO/Unix/<version>/<same_path>

And, /SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin and /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/usr/bin are two different real directories. For example sh is in one and not the other, vi is in the other and not the one.

# ls -l /bin/sh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Apr 9 2003 /bin/sh -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/sh

# ls -l /usr/bin/vi lrwxrwxrwx 1 root sys 34 Jan 28 2010 /usr/bin/vi -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/usr/bin/vi

# ls -l /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/sh -rwxr-xr-t 1 bin bin 59536 Feb 18 2003 /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/sh

# ls -l /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/vi ls: /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/vi not found: No such file or directory (error 2)

# ls -l /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/usr/bin/vi -rwx--x--t 1 bin bin 151828 Jan 28 2010 /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/usr/bin/vi

# ls -l /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/vi ls: /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/vi not found: No such file or directory (error 2)

And /sbin is a completely differnet issue: # ls -l /bin/sh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Apr 9 2003 /bin/sh -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/bin/sh # ls -l /sbin/sh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Apr 9 2003 /sbin/sh -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.7Hw/sbin/sh # ls -lL /bin/sh -rwxr-xr-t 1 bin bin 59536 Feb 18 2003 /bin/sh # ls -lL /sbin/sh -rwxr-xr-t 1 bin bin 117232 Feb 18 2003 /sbin/sh # file /bin/sh /bin/sh: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386, dynamically linked, stripped, no debug # file /sbin/sh /sbin/sh: iAPX 386 COFF demand-paged executable #

Static binaries for emergency/repair.

I think only SCO ever did that "everything is a symlink" thing, so that aspect isn't "traditional" for sure, but openserver is rather widely installed and has been for a lot of years. It was by far the most installed commercial unix for intel for small business for many years.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:39:56AM -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 01/26/2012 07:54 PM, Greg KH wrote:

...

Here's a good document describing the why behind this type of change: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

It's something that I think we should push for 12.2 if at all possible.

I've created a wiki page to help track the work

http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:UsrMerge

also includes instruction for people to help in the process.

If I messed any packages (see disclaimer at the bottom of the table) or have extra packages feel free to fix up the table. Keeping packages in alpha order will make things easier on people ;)

Also if anyone has converted packages already please mark them in the table.

Last but not least if anyone is inclined to add some automation around this that would be great help as well.

Uh, why should we do that for 12.2? Lets wait a bit and see how well things go with Fedora. No need to hurry...

Cheers, Michael.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 09:35:04AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:

...

Uh, why should we do that for 12.2? Lets wait a bit and see how well things go with Fedora. No need to hurry...

Why wait?

Do you read the Fedora mailing lists? They are having lots of fun with this feature.

Also, I only see Fedora who want this, not "the Linux community" like the openSUSE:UsrMerge page claims. What do the other distributions think about this change?

Cheers, Michael.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 06:28:31PM +0100, Michael Schroeder wrote:

Uh, why should we do that for 12.2? Lets wait a bit and see how well things go with Fedora. No need to hurry...

At least I'd like to postpone this until rpm has learnt how to replace directories with symlinks and vice versa.

We really want a 'zypper dup' to work. Currently Fedora relies on some external program meddling with the directories.

(Also note the flame fest on the Fedora lists, we don't want the same thing to happen here.)

Cheers, Michael.

On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 12:02:38PM +0100, Juergen Weigert wrote:

On Jan 31, 12 18:42:26 +0100, Michael Schroeder wrote:

...

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 06:28:31PM +0100, Michael Schroeder wrote:

...

Uh, why should we do that for 12.2? Lets wait a bit and see how well things go with Fedora. No need to hurry...

At least I'd like to postpone this until rpm has learnt how to replace directories with symlinks and vice versa.

Old rpm bug, sigh. Do we wait on upstream to fix this?

Well, we're part of upstream, right?

... Technically thinking ... rpmbuild itself could actually take care of the whole issue. When processing the %files section, it could make sure, that everything ends up in /usr/* and provide symlinks as needed.

Uh, how does that solve the update issue?

...

We really want a 'zypper dup' to work.

True.

...

(Also note the flame fest on the Fedora lists, we don't want the same thing to happen here.)

IMHO The merge is a good thing. I always had difficulties explaining the split to newbies.

As both /bin and /usr/bin are in the path, I don't see how newbies are affected.

Cheers, Michael.