Debian Votes To Reinstate Merged-/usr File Movement Moratorium

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Votes To Reinstate Merged-/usr File Movement Moratorium

The Debian Technical Committee has voted to reinstate the merged-/usr file movement moratorium...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Reinstate-usr-Moratorium

[soulsource]

What is the actual reasoning for merged-usr?
I know that the driving force behind this is systemd, but they must have a reason to push for it?

[jabl]

What is the actual reasoning for merged-usr?
I know that the driving force behind this is systemd, but they must have a reason to push for it?

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/

Some historical background why the split was introduced, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/b...er/074114.html

[SleeepyKat]

What is the actual reasoning for merged-usr?
I know that the driving force behind this is systemd, but they must have a reason to push for it?

The real question is, what is the reasoning for a splitted-usr? Back in the days, some people wanted to be able to mount /usr via NFS, but who does that anymore? Companies who want to distribute software on their local network with NFS can still do this in another path anyway.

Having a splitted-usr is just an unnecessary complexity. And I remember back in the 2000s seeing scripts that would fail because they expect awk to be in /usr/bin when it was in /bin Thank god we don't need to care about this anymore.

And by the way, the merged-usr idea came up a long time before systemd. You could say systemd accelerated the transition though.

[skeevy420]

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/

Some historical background why the split was introduced, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/b...er/074114.html

The worst part about all of this, the short and cryptographic directory names, the doubled and tripled up directories with the same names, etc...pun intended...is that it all comes down to 1960s computing limitations.

I also find it very, very, very funny that the usr-merge can be seen as a meta hack. /usr was hacked together because they ran out of hard drive space. usr-merge is a hack to put everything within the hack. You'd think they'd want do it the other way around and merge usr back with the rest of the system.

It'd be nice if the Linux FHS 4.0 started naming directories like GoboLinux does.

[archkde]

What is the actual reasoning for merged-usr?
I know that the driving force behind this is systemd, but they must have a reason to push for it?

There is no good reason for split-/usr either, it's mostly a historic accident like other people already noted. The original layout was having binaries in /bin and libraries in /lib (and usr-merge in some sense brings us closer to that again). Then the root disk got full and software not required for boot got moved to the disk with the user directories (/usr). Now we've had big disks and initrds for booting for quite some time already, so the split became pointless again.

[Sonadow]

I have been experimenting with some Russian Linux distributions recently.

One thing that struck me as quite interesting is that most of the Russian distributions that used to base themselves off Mandrake or Mandriva never implemented the /usr merge. While the Russian distributions that base themselves off CentOS and Debian do.

Which is very strange because Mageia and OpenMandrive have implemented the /usr merge.

[darkoverlordofdata]

But why this change - all I hear as a reason is a history lesson. What happened to “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it”?

I don’t see how history is a valid justification for this change. Bigger hard drives existed when Linux was first created. And they didn’t make this change then - though they did make some changes - for example /usr/home was moved to /home. And Linux puts some files in /usr that exist in /usr/local on Unix. So, if this were really important, you’d think it would have been done back in the 90’s.

[docontra]

But why this change - all I hear as a reason is a history lesson. What happened to “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it”?

As far as the people pushing for the change are concerned, it is broken (and, for what it's worth, they're completely right within their use-cases; just because the breakage is academic at best on ours doesn't mean it's perfect ).

I don’t see how history is a valid justification for this change. Bigger hard drives existed when Linux was first created. And they didn’t make this change then - though they did make some changes - for example /usr/home was moved to /home. And Linux puts some files in /usr that exist in /usr/local on Unix. So, if this were really important, you’d think it would have been done back in the 90’s.

The historical accident was having everything you needed to start booting (or attempt further system recovery) in /, and not (yet) having initrd/initramfs. Step forward to the mid '00s and "everybody and their $PET" have a perfectly functional pre-boot/early-boot/recovery environment in their initrd/initramfs, making a small / outdated-ish.

(Yes, the people "winning big" from merged /usr are not your typical desktop/server installs, but the change is small and has minimal to no effect for mainstream distro users with default-ish boot).

[stompcrash]

I didn't know /usr was really originally for user home directories. I thought it stood for UNIX System Resources.

Given the history, I'd be fine with drastically simplifying everything down to basically just /bin, /sbin, /lib, /etc, and /var . I guess a /include for development headers. And I would keep /opt or some other directory to store software which needs to be manually downloaded and installed.