Getting rid of /usr for F12?

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Fri Apr 17 04:48:49 UTC 2009


Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> there's one topic that keeps popping up in various discussions: can't
> we get rid of /usr? The seperation of / and /usr doesn't make much
> sense anymore.
This is a very short-sighed view.

> We could make /usr a symlink to / for an interims phase
> and everything would be good for conservative folks who think the FHS
> is the holy bible.
Religiousity isn't the point - The point is: There are reasons for why 
the FHS rsp. the GNU standards are setup the way they are.

> In the past more and more stuff has been moved from /usr to /.
Not quite: Actually, only very few files have been moved from /usr
to /. The overwhelming majority resides in /usr.

> Let's eliminate this source of errors and clean up our file system
> layout a bit. Let's drop /usr for F12!
Well, I guess,  I don't have pronounce what I think about this proposal.

> And for the folks who think /usr is awesome because it allows mounting
> /usr ro while mounting / rw: it's not.
> Much more useful it would be if
> / in its entirety could be mounted ro. Debian allows that. It's not
> too hard to make that work on fedora as well.
You are oversimplifying.

Mounting / ro: will never work (/var, /tmp, /etc etc.) , while mounting 
/usr ro: should be pretty simply.

Actually, anything, which prevents mounting /usr ro: qualifies as plain 
and simple "system integration bug".

> We wouldn't exactly be the first system without /usr as it seems. 
Yes, Windows never had it and other crippled *nix variants who aimed at 
imitating Windows IIRC, have tried to avoid it also.




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