On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote:
>
> On Sep 30, 2013 9:31 AM, "Daniel Campbell" <li...@sporkbox.us> wrote:
>>
>
> --- le snip ---
>
>> If the proposed solution is all binaries and libraries in the same
>> root/prefix directory, then why call it /usr?
>
> My question exactly.
>
> Why install to /usr at all, leaving /bin and /sbin a practically empty
> directory containing symlinks only?
>
> I mean, I have no quarrel with / and /usr separation, having had them in the
> same partition for ages... but why not do it the other way around, i.e., put
> everything in / and have /usr be a container for symlinks?
>

If the binaries and libraries are kept together, /usr can actually be made
reliably sharable, independent of local settings in /etc. It can also be made
properly readonly, or otherwise use different mount options than /.

Most of the things in /usr have the same read-write characteristics.
They're mostly chunks of 1-20mb in size that are read very often and
written very rarely. You can pick a filesystem with options that
optimized for that. They're also non-data, so the root of that tree
has an entirely different backup priority than /etc or /home.

And then there are directories in /usr that don't exist in /. Are you
gonna link them too? So we have /share now? Or /src?

Seems to me that it makes less mess to move / to /usr than vice versa.
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