Debian Repeals The Merged "/usr" Movement Moratorium

[acobar]

What never cease to amuse me is: "Why this thing that has been used for eons, cause no trouble, and isn't an impediment for anything, should stay this way? Let's change it for the sake of change!".

Really, things stored under "/usr/*" for system resources are perfectly fine, and for user's things there are already options that make more sense, like "Documents", "Pictures" and whatnot.

People that ask for this kind of changes, usually, think about how things are done on Windows, working supporting their users for a long time, my impression is the following:
- for 99% (cabalistic number detected!) of users, it doesn't matter;
- for the 1% that know how to fix problems, Windows is a lot worse to look for a clue about what is wrong, and part of it is because of its FS layout.

[Danny3]

Well, I couldn't care less!
I always found Debian's and of course FHS structure crap!
I hate the 3 letter abbreviations that you can never be sure sure what they came from just because somebody was lazy or didn't want to type more letters in the terminal.
Who the fuck can guess at first sight that is "etc"?
Wouldn't it be much intuitive and logical to be called "Configurations" or "Settings"?
I much prefer a hierarchy structure as the one proposed by GoboLinux:

https://wiki.gobolinux.org/Overview/GoboLinux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/index.html

Honestly that should be the default and the other one should be mapped with symlinks or whatever to it.

[ThomasW]

IMHO, should have been done 2 or 3 releases ago.

I totally agree. Arch did this 10 years ago.

Only once have I benefitted from it (overlayfs /var and /usr as lowers to create a semi-immutable system) but it was a bit of a bodge.

It sounds like you could use verity-squash-root instead.

[stormcrow]

Funny that you mention these. /usr is actually short for "user" and originally had the purpose now fulfilled by /home. So the answer may just be "because they came late enough".

By the time /home and other more "modern" adaptations came along the terse Unix paradigm was starting to slip. It's hard to justify using cryptic 2 or 3 letter conventions when RAM and static storage increases from "x no. of words" to "kilobytes" to "megabytes" to hundreds of megabytes by the time Linux came along. Early Unix was tightly limited by storage and RAM space so terse acronyms were the norm. Course there are a lot of people that still stubbornly cling to the idea that the "Unix way" is both "terse" and "do one thing". That really became obsolete when computers began to be able to multiprocess in the 80s and especially in the 90s as PCs moved from single process CPUs to multiprocessing capable. Most Unix tools haven't adhered to "do one thing" in decades. A lot of people don't realize what appear to be single programs are actually the same program that perform different functions depending on how they're named while ancient programs still around for compatibility reasons have added new functions they didn't originally have over the years of their existence.

[bachchain]

The committee has repealed the moratorium of the proposal"

Jesus, I don't think it'd be possible to make that sound any more boring

[ThomasW]

just because somebody was lazy or didn't want to type more letters in the

Probably this happened before the autocomplete shells

[skeevy420]

Well, I couldn't care less!
I always found Debian's and of course FHS structure crap!
I hate the 3 letter abbreviations that you can never be sure sure what they came from just because somebody was lazy or didn't want to type more letters in the terminal.
Who the fuck can guess at first sight that is "etc"?
Wouldn't it be much intuitive and logical to be called "Configurations" or "Settings"?
I much prefer a hierarchy structure as the one proposed by GoboLinux:

https://wiki.gobolinux.org/Overview/GoboLinux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/index.html

Honestly that should be the default and the other one should be mapped with symlinks or whatever to it.

Directory To Configure wasn't clear?

[kpedersen]

Probably this happened before the autocomplete shells

I chuckled.

But then I realize I probably hammer the tab key through compulsion more than if I just typed the darn characters! haha.

[TheMightyBuzzard]

I don't see the point in merging these in the first place. Symlinks to the other folders are likely to exist in perpetuity for the sake of backward compatibility.

Didn't you know? New is always better. Especially when it solves a problem that nobody has.

[TheMightyBuzzard]

At least flatpak and appimage partly solve this problem apparently inspired by MacOS .app application inclusive directory structures...

They don't solve anything for anyone who doesn't demand their hand be held every minute by the OS. All they do is add bloat that makes Windows devs say "Damn, that's bloated..."