Getting rid of /usr for F12?

[Ralf Corsepius]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 17.04.09 06:48, Ralf Corsepius (rc040203 at freenet.de) wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Oh, is it?
Yes.

[Note that this had been the "polite version" of what I actually think 
about your proposal.]

>>> 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.
> 
> First of all FHS is not a "GNU standard". 
"The GNU standards" is a standard of its own, predating the FHS.

> Secondly, it is of course very convincing if you just nebulously say
> 'there are rasons' instead of mentioning any.
Number #1 reason: /usr is ment to contains non-essential packages, only, 
and thus is allowed not to be present during certain stages of booting.

>>> 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.
> 
> On Debian /etc doesn't need to be rw. And it wouldn't be too difficult
> to allow the same on Fedora.
In theory, yes. However /etc still needs to be mountable rw: (To set up 
the system), while /bin, /sbin/, /lib, /usr ... in theory can even not 
be mountable "rw:" (Consider ROMs, CDROMs, etc.)

Ralf