On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:47:25AM +1000, Karl Goetz wrote:
> On Mon, 9 May 2011 10:38:42 +0100
> Roger Leigh <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > From the FHS POV, I would like to suggest these changes:
> > • Permit /usr to be a symlink to /.  This gives distributors the
> > option of unifying the / and /usr namespaces.  This is a logical
> > consequence of keeping / and /usr on the same filesystem.  In the
> > distant future it might be possible to eliminate /usr entirely, but
> > at this point it would be appropriate to have the option of making it
> > a symlink.
> 
> Sounds like a good step. would we note that /usr could/should be
> deprecated, or would we simply save it for a future release of the FHS?

It's probably a bit early for anything like deprecation.  At this
point, I think giving distributors the option of making it a
symlink would be sufficient.  My short term goal here is to allow
the debian-installer to provide the option of merging / and /usr
at install time by creating the symlink during initial bootstrap.
The actual packages will continue to use /usr to permit use of a
real /usr or a merged setup, so this should appear almost entirely
transparent to both users and distribution packaging.

It will require a full audit to idenfity duplicate/conflicting paths
in / and /usr, and fixing them, plus fixing any tools which break
due to e.g. library search paths causing confusion since all the
contents of /usr/lib will also be in /lib--GNU/Hurd already
supported this for years, but there may be regressions to address.


WRT the need for embedded systems to have a separate /usr, I can't
really comment on this having little embedded experience.


Regards,
Roger

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