Fedora 17 Moves Forward With Unified File-System

[FireBurn]

The idea is you could mount an entire new distro onto /usr very easily or use snapshotting from btrfs to allow easier rollbacks

If you read the arguments for this you'll see that it's very thought out

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

[Nobu]

I think the goal is simply to make /[s]bin and /usr/[s]bin equivalent. You could achieve the same by moving the folders from /usr to /, but you would still need symlinks for compatibility (thus, /usr would remain), so there's really no point.

Also, see the page linked in the article:

Myth #11: Instead of merging / into /usr it would make a lot more sense to merge /usr into /.

Fact: This would make the separation between vendor-supplied OS resources and machine-specific even worse, thus making OS snapshots and network/container sharing of it much harder and non-atomic, and clutter the root file system with a multitude of new directories.

[LibertyZero]

The unified file-system is a good idea and a step into the right direction and I'm looking forward to see the change in a lot more distributions.
Btw., does someone know what happened to gobolinux? Unfortunately the project seems to be dead. While their file-system structure was certainly controversial, it was a consequent and interesting re-layout imho.

[mattst88]

src, share, local, and include are the normal ones that I see, not sure about games and libexec. In any event, do you spend a lot of time in / where a few extra directories would really bother you? Now that the stuff in /usr will only be in /usr, the grouping will be pretty arbitrary compared to what's sitting directly in /.

That's not the point. The point is that the directories in / that are being merged into /usr already exist in /usr.

The same is not true in the other direction -- as I just showed.

[roland]

src, share, local, and include are the normal ones that I see, not sure about games and libexec. In any event, do you spend a lot of time in / where a few extra directories would really bother you? Now that the stuff in /usr will only be in /usr, the grouping will be pretty arbitrary compared to what's sitting directly in /.

[mattst88]

Why move / -> /usr? Why not /usr -> / with /usr becoming a symlink to /?

Because /usr includes a lot of folders that aren't in /.

/usr/games
/usr/libexec
/usr/local
/usr/share
/usr/src
/usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

etc

[roland]

Why move / -> /usr? Why not /usr -> / with /usr becoming a symlink to /?

Agreed. +1

[Aquous]

Why move / -> /usr? Why not /usr -> / with /usr becoming a symlink to /?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 17 Moves Forward With Unified File-System

Fedora 17 is moving forward with plans whereby the entire base operating system will live within /usr by condensing several common directories that have been long-standing to Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA0OTY