Richard Yao posted on Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:15:58 -0400 as excerpted:
>> On Apr 4, 2016, at 9:19 PM, William Hubbs <willi...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> >> All, >> >> I thought that since the usr merge is coming up again, and since I lost >> track of the message where it was brought up, I would open a new thread >> to discuss it. >> >> When it came up before, some were saying that the /usr merge violates >> the fhs. I don't remember the specifics of what the claim was at the >> time, (I'm sure someone will point it out if it is still a concern). > > Here are the violations: > > http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/ fhs-3.0.html#binEssentialUserCommandBinaries > > http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/ fhs-3.0.html#sbinSystemBinaries > > http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/ fhs-3.0.html#libEssentialSharedLibrariesAndKern (Those links are wrapped and I'm not bothering to jump thru the hoops to unwrap them, since readers can either unwrap them manually or refer to the parent post I'm quoting for the unwrapped versions.) If those are the "violations", then putting everything in /usr and making the /bin and /sbin locations symlinks isn't going to be a problem, since /bin and /sbin are specifically allowed to contain symlinks to the executables, instead of the executables themselves, and if the dirs themselves are symlinks to the locations in /usr with the files, that fulfills that requirement. And the requirement for /lib is rather vague, saying only that it contains the libs linked by the executables in /bin and /sbin. So once / bin and /sbin are symlinks to the dirs with the executables, /lib (or the arch-specific alternative libdirs) can be a symlink as well. Tho I must say doing the reverse, making either /usr itself or /usr/bin and /usr/sbin symlinks to the root dirs, as I did here, actually makes more sense and bends the rules less. Basically, what the FHS says, at least in the 3.0 version you linked, is that the executables must be reachable via whatever specific path, but using symlinks to do it is fine. Which means the merge is allowed, as long as symlinks allow the executables to be reached by their specifically defined paths. And I'm not aware of anyone seriously proposing that said symlinks be omitted, so... -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
