Debian Repeals The Merged "/usr" Movement Moratorium

[TheMightyBuzzard]

Then rename it to "Configurations" and move everything out of it that doesn't belong there to proper directories.
If they don't exist, create them.
Not having a properly organized root directory because of historical reasons is stupid.
Especially when you have symlinks and you can solve compatibility issues too with them.

Or leave it exactly as it is and tell the children to learn instead of complaining.

[ThomasW]

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?

You probably could use a networkfs with overlayfs. Then you have the old binaries and the new ones, both in /usr/

[Sonadow]

The beauty of open source is if you have a better idea you can grab a kernel (linux, *bsd, minix, 9front etc etc) and a userland and refashion the world to your liking. After which you can proselytize your vision of the new world.🤔

That's the beauty of opensource, you say.

Then why aren't the opensource users extending opensource projects? Look at the number of people bitching about how dotNET MAUI doesn't support Linux even though all of it is opensource. Why aren't they refashioning MAUI to support Linux and demanding Microsoft do so?

And look at the number of people bitching about Nvidia's open kernel driver. Why aren't they refashioning that open source driver into something better suited for themselves?

Anybody can take the source and refashion it to their liking. So why aren't they doing so? Why are they demanding that the maintainers do so?

[mangeek]

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

(/s but also kind of unironically)

Honestly, I've always rather liked Apple's layout, including having apps self-contained to their .app directory with multiple binaries under it. I know that's a huge deviation from how we do it in Linux, but imagine if Linux used

# stuff to boot up
/boot
/bin
/sbin
/var

# stuff for after you're booted r/w
/Users
/NetUsers (to delineate between accounts that are local or on a network/cloud home folder)

/OneDrive
/cifs-$DOMAIN

/Libraries (instead of /usr)
/runtimes

/ubuntu20.04
/centos9stream
/openjdk-21

/Applications
/LibreOffice.app

/res
/lib
/bin

/x86_64

etc...

Obviously, this is thinking that belongs somewhere far away from Debian, but I've always wanted that 'runtimes' folder so things like older/different distros and runtimes could be tapped directly (and hacked on a bit to do stuff like backport newer SDL) rather than Flatpack/Snaps/Containers.

[bumblebritches57]

Honestly, I've always rather liked Apple's layout, including having apps self-contained to their .app directory with multiple binaries under it. I know that's a huge deviation from how we do it in Linux, but imagine if Linux used

# stuff to boot up
/boot
/bin
/sbin
/var

# stuff for after you're booted r/w
/Users
/NetUsers (to delineate between accounts that are local or on a network/cloud home folder)

/OneDrive
/cifs-$DOMAIN

/Libraries (instead of /usr)
/runtimes

/ubuntu20.04
/centos9stream
/openjdk-21

/Applications
/LibreOffice.app

/res
/lib
/bin

/x86_64

etc...

Obviously, this is thinking that belongs somewhere far away from Debian, but I've always wanted that 'runtimes' folder so things like older/different distros and runtimes could be tapped directly (and hacked on a bit to do stuff like backport newer SDL) rather than Flatpack/Snaps/Containers.

I’m a fan of how Apple does it too, I’ve put some thought into this also and here’s what I came up with:

/System/* for all system binaries, libraries, config files, scripts, etc.

like /System/Kernels/6.5.1/bin/vmlinuz.tgz

headers can live there too in /System/Kernels/6.5.1/Headers (or /include as per tradition though I prefer the directness of Headers)

/Applications/AppName/Configurations/USERNAME/*

where various config files.are stored on a per user basis.

then when the app is copied or deleted, all relevant user files are kept with it, and the user specific config directory can be protected with permissions too.

another example:

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Firefox

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Gecko.so,libxul.so,etc

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Resources/Firefox.svg

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Configuration/Firefox.xml (The default/global settings)

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Configuration/Marcus/Firefox.xml (User specific settings)

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.37/Configuration/Marcus/Bookmarks.xml

/Applications/Mozilla/Firefox/118.0.47/Configuration/Marcus/History.sqlite

[mangeek]

Though keyboards have improved as well since the 80s, I'd still rather prefer typing less. Because no matter how high your CPM strike ratio is,

<tt>c:\program files</tt>

is always 4x as long as e.g.

<tt>/opt</tt>

. Yeah, Windows has TAB completion too by now (it used to not exist in Win9x), but then there are snags like

<tt>C:\Program Files (x86)</tt>

which break the tabbing rhythm, as do characters that require mandatory modifier key use like '(' or '\' (some layouts).

I think everyone agrees that "Program Files" is an abomination of a core directory, as is the "common" folder under it. "Applications" is so much more sane. Having "/app" linked to "Applications" or vice-versa is even more enlightened if you want to keep things simple on the CLI.

[Danny3]

Or leave it exactly as it is and tell the children to learn instead of complaining.

Yeah, learn the crap structure instead of fixing and improving it...
What a great lesson to teach children!
No wonder Linux is still at 1% market share.

[ireri]

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".

WTH are you saying, /usr is a short for universal system resourses, not "user".

[elml]

I think everyone agrees that "Program Files" is an abomination ...

Rumor has it that style of naming was deliberately chosen to break Linux systems by introducing the " " and Capital Letters into directory names...

(Or is that called "Market Differentiation"?)


Meanwhile...

If you really want to have an alternate file system structure, you can. To your hearts content.

Simply write a script to mount a newly created tmpfs to then populate it with whatever structure you wish, all linking into the physical reality you rather not wish to see.

Simples.


Be excellent to one another.

Enjoy!!
Martin

[AcornAnomaly]

Rumor has it that style of naming was deliberately chosen to break Linux systems by introducing the " " and Capital Letters into directory names...

Capital letters don't make a difference on Windows, as the win32 File API does not treat filenames as case sensitive.

Spaces, in the other hand, are different. I believe Raymond Chen has flat-out said on his blog that "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings"(former name of the Users folder) were specifically chosen to force application developers to learn to deal with spaces in filenames properly, as there were a ton of programs that would break if you tried to install them to a path with a space in it, or tried to give them a file path with a space in it to process.