On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote: > > On Sep 30, 2013 9:31 AM, "Daniel Campbell" <li...@sporkbox.us> wrote: >> > > --- le snip --- > >> If the proposed solution is all binaries and libraries in the same >> root/prefix directory, then why call it /usr? > > My question exactly. > > Why install to /usr at all, leaving /bin and /sbin a practically empty > directory containing symlinks only? > > I mean, I have no quarrel with / and /usr separation, having had them in the > same partition for ages... but why not do it the other way around, i.e., put > everything in / and have /usr be a container for symlinks? >
If the binaries and libraries are kept together, /usr can actually be made reliably sharable, independent of local settings in /etc. It can also be made properly readonly, or otherwise use different mount options than /. Most of the things in /usr have the same read-write characteristics. They're mostly chunks of 1-20mb in size that are read very often and written very rarely. You can pick a filesystem with options that optimized for that. They're also non-data, so the root of that tree has an entirely different backup priority than /etc or /home. And then there are directories in /usr that don't exist in /. Are you gonna link them too? So we have /share now? Or /src? Seems to me that it makes less mess to move / to /usr than vice versa. -- This email is: [ ] actionable [x] fyi [ ] social Response needed: [ ] yes [ ] up to you [x] no Time-sensitive: [ ] immediate [ ] soon [x] none
