Debian Repeals The Merged "/usr" Movement Moratorium

[TheMightyBuzzard]

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.

No, what's hard to justify is changing something that everyone understands and creates no problems for anyone all for the sake of bratty little kids who object to learning anything at all.

[sdack]

The historical reason for why there are /lib- and /bin-directories, and /usr/lib and /usr/bin, is to be able to have a /-root filesystem on one drive and the /usr-filesystem on another (i.e. a network drive). This allows admins to still boot a system when the /usr-filesystem is broken. The /sbin-directory in particular is for statically-linked binaries that need no libraries, again for the purpose of having at least a partially working system in order for admins to fix problems when the /lib- or /usr/lib-directory is compromised.

I can see the appeal to merge the directories, because today's drives are much larger than they were in the past and many will now use one drive for everything. However, the purpose has not become completely obsolete and the usefulness is still valid, in particular for small systems like SBCs.

Does the proposal say anything about retaining the usefulness in other ways, or is it ignoring it and making it only about getting rid of it?

[stormcrow]

No, what's hard to justify is changing something that everyone understands and creates no problems for anyone all for the sake of bratty little kids who object to learning anything at all.

I rest my case.

[cl333r]

Or we could just get rid of it all, NixOS / Guix style.

(/s but also kind of unironically)

So that we finally have a next-gen OS with next-gen internet instead of the boredom around us?

[QwertyChouskie]

Ahh how cute, the PlayStation/Xbox generation of developers has taken over the world. Their next proposal will be, "we need to change the name from /usr to /user and stop using the silent 'e'."

I'm surprised there isn't already a "systemd-userd" module to deal with this dilemma once and for all. Get on it, Lennart, what is Microsoft paying you the big bucks for anyway?

systemd-homed is in fact a thing, and seems pretty cool from what I've seen. It makes users/user directories 100% portable, so you could e.g. just copy /home/username from one system to another, and everything would automagically Just Work.

[billyswong]

Directory To Configure wasn't clear?

"cfg" would have been clearer. "etc" stands for "et cetera" for most people. I wonder such overlap of acronym is intentional or not.

[archkde]

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"?

As with /usr, that's a leftover from a time where it had a different meaning. /etc really means "et cetera" because it was a dumping ground for everything that didn't fit elsewhere (such as configuration files, but also some stuff that's nowadays in sbin, libexec or proc).

[sdack]

"cfg" would have been clearer. "etc" stands for "et cetera" for most people. I wonder such overlap of acronym is intentional or not.

It does not stand for "configuration" or "directory to configure". It does indeed stand for "et cetera". It not only contains configuration files, but also passwords, shell scripts, init levels, terminal definitions, name to value mappings, etc. ... meaning a variety of assorted files, which do not necessarily belong into /bin, /lib, /usr, /dev or /var.

To call it a configuration directory is a bit misleading, because some of the files in /etc should not be modified, or at least not by hand. And a system's configuration consists of more than just the files found in /etc.

[TheMightyBuzzard]

I rest my case.

Kid: This boat is poorly designed. We need to change the design to something sane and fix it right now.

Everyone else: We're on it in the middle of the lake right now, idiot.

[flower]

Does the proposal say anything about retaining the usefulness in other ways, or is it ignoring it and making it only about getting rid of it?

systemd requires /usr/bin in the same fs as root anyway. as debian uses systemd it is not possible to use a different partition or fs anymore.