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>/