On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:54 AM, Anthony G. Basile <bluen...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > As I'm getting into this thread, I'm looking at debian, fedora and I'll > add openSUSE. I just don't get why a usr merge is as good as that > fedora page says. >
Keep in mind Fedora's purposes here: 1. It is a feeder where experimental technologies are previewed/developed. 2. It is feeding into RHEL, which is targeted at infrequently-updating users who run in a release-based atmosphere. The purpose of a /usr merge is to get all the stateless stuff into one place. Some of the ultimate goals include: 1. A read-only /usr 2. Having /usr signature-verified at boot 3. Having everything that runs signature-checked before it is run 4. Having /usr shared across many containers/etc. 5. Stateless systems - boot with a /usr and it creates the rest dynamically, and they're lost when the container is shut down. Any of these COULD be implemented on Gentoo, though whether it will happen is questionable. Some of these like #5 would require more invasive changes to how we do things. However, the principle of having everything that is static in one place does make sense. Put it this way, if you were designing a new OS from scratch today, would it make more sense to put all the distro-supplied binaries/libraries under a single path off the root, or off of many paths from the root? The main driver for having a split /usr is legacy, IMO. Apparently even the unix authors said that they originally did it only because of the size of one of their disks and they wanted root to be a secondary bootloader. -- Rich
