On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Daniel Campbell <li...@sporkbox.us> wrote:
> I'm not affected by anything regarding the /usr switch, but I'd like
> to have a good talk with the first person who decided a
> system-critical binary belonged in /usr instead of /bin or /sbin.
> They've created a mess for every distro and any project that depends
> on their work.
(sorry for the previous post, accidentally clicked somewhere onscreen)
As I've pointed out before:
1) "system-critical" is actually dependent on the system. A system dependent
on an smb share will find smbmount system critical. One dependent on
zfs-fuse will find fuse system critical. With the advent of fuse,
some filesystem
that depends on an arbitrary user program will find that system-critical.
While this works for for 99.(99?)% of user systems out there, FHS
is supposed
to be targetting all of them, and so it fails in principle in that respect.
I remember making a lengthy thread on this mailing list challenging how FHS
defined this and it appeared that nobody could make a defense.
2) the reality is, it's not just binaries even. There are some things
that binaries
depend on, that in theory should be in /. For example, the hwid database, or
libraries. Libraries make for a complex problem, because /usr is supposed to
be network-sharable. Any libraries your programs depend on can't simply just
be pushed to /, because then there'd be the chance that the
programs and their
libraries were not in sync.
I made a handful of criticisms to FHS in that thread before, and nobody was
able to mount a suitable defense. The point being, even in principle, separating
/ and /usr is flaky design at best. That we just so happened to
accumulate a number
of packages that are historically installed to /usr is a consequence
of that. It's not
even necessarily the fault of the upstream developer, who's not
supposed to care so
much which PREFIX they install to, or the distro packager, who can't yet predict
how the user will tailor their system.
If you were in the shoes of the ebuild packagers, you would be hard-pressed to
predict which packages belong in the / PREFIX and which ones in /usr PREFIX,
100 times out of 100. But you need 100 times out of 100 or you'll get
people whining
that they can't boot or whining that they need to do some migration. That's
why / and /usr separation is broken.
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