> If you were to issue 'ls -l /' You'll find that /bin, /sbin,
> lib{32,64,x32} are linked to their counterparts in /usr/. I under-
> stand the logic in doing so. However, for specific reasons that would
> require exhaustive explanations that I would prefer to save us all from
> me doing, I would like to break this behaviour by having /usr genuinely
> be whole heartedly installed on its own partition.
As mentioned by Andy, the symlinks still work fine when `/usr` is on
another partition.
> I'm cool with doing things the hard and painful way. Any details you
> can share that would allow me to figure out how to break, or divert
> this behaviour would be appreciated. I'm not elite with linux enough
> to figure this out, but I am comfertable with digging deep with the
> right background knowledge to navigate what's needed.
Assuming you still want to "unmerge" / and /usr, for some reason, I'd
start by replacing those top-level symlinks with directories full
of symlinks. E.g. replace the `/bin` symlink with a fresh new `/bin`
directory which contains symlinks to everything in `/usr/bin`.
That should be pretty safe. After that, you can start removing some of
those many symlinks, e.g. for those executables that have never lived in
`/bin` (you can (still) use `dpkg -L` or `dpkg -S` to figure out if
that executable "belongs to /usr or to /").
You may also decide to move some executables from `/usr/bin` to `/bin`
and place a symlink in `/usr/bin` for those (a.k.a. reverse the
direction of those symlinks).
Stefan
