On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Hobbit <little_hob...@lavabit.com> wrote: >> Why should we care about ancient filesystems that didn't supported >> long paths, and therefore we got stuck with /usr since we didn't >> wanted to waste another *single* character to make it /user? > > Because of it's original name: "UNIX System Resources" (usr).
As William pointed out, this is just another silly rationalization done after the fact. But, just for argument's sake, lets suppose that "usr" was named like that because it was the acronym for "UNIX System Resources". *Who cares about that now?* It was 43 years ago. My cellphone is thousands of times faster than the PDP-7 Unix was originally developed for, and it has millions of times more storage. The length restrictions imposed on system directories are completely superfluous now. All the arguments for keeping /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin separated are really instances of the Chewbacca defense [1]. They just don't make any sense. If upstream projects want to move everything to one location, Gentoo should follow suit. If enough Gentoo devs (as others had argued) want to waste their efforts in maintaining this artificial and silly division between /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin, it is of course their prerogative. But it must be clear that all the rationale behind said division was invented after the fact, and (as Rob Landley said in his email [2]) maintained "for decades by bureaucrats who never question _why_ they're doing things". Regards. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense [2] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
