On 03/14/12 16:55, Zac Medico wrote: > On 03/14/2012 01:03 PM, Richard Yao wrote: >> I do not have a separate /usr partition, however I agree with Joshua >> Kinard's stance regarding the /usr move. The point of having a separate >> /usr was to enable UNIX to exceed the space constraints that a 1.5MB >> hard disk placed on rootfs. As far as I know, we do not support a 1.5MB >> rootfs so it would make sense to deprecate the practice of having things >> that belong in / in /usr directory, as opposed to making /usr into a new /. >> >> Deprecation of this practice would mean that people could type >> /bin/command instead of /usr/bin/command in situations where absolute >> paths are necessary. We could symlink things in /usr to rootfs for >> compatibility with legacy software. In a more extreme case, we could >> symlink /usr to /, which would make plenty of sense given that we do not >> need a separate /usr at all. > > I'm not seeing any compelling benefits here that would justify a lack of > conformity with other *nix distros. It seems almost as though it's an > attempt to be different for the sake of being different, perhaps a > symptom of something like NIH syndrome.
How did RedHat justify that lack of conformity that resulted from moving
everything into /usr in the first place? The original UNIX did not have
anything in /usr. The /usr split was caused by Bell Labs having to grow
UNIX past the constraints of a 1.5MB hard drive. Since we are no longer
limited by such space constraints, I fail to see why we should not
deprecate /usr.
In the meantime, it should be possible to create a global usr USE flag
that enables/disables gen_usr_ldscript. It would then be possible to
delete all of the usr ldscripts, dump /usr into / and symlink /usr to /.
The dynamic linker would go to / before /usr and it would be trivial to
modify $PATH to ignore /usr entirely. Legacy software that requires
/usr/{bin,sbin} would still work while those that want a separate /usr
mount could symlink /usr/{bin,include,libexec,sbin} into their rootfs
counterparts.
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