DJ Lucas wrote:
> On 01/03/2011 09:51 PM, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
>> William Immendorf wrote:

>>>  2. XZ-utils is considered a core compression utility (like Bzip2 and
>>> Gzip), yet the programs are not on the root partition.

>> I really didn't consider it a core compression utility since I've never 
>> really *needed* it.  However, both gzip and bzip2 are in /bin.  When I 
>> look at some other distros, I don't see bzip2 in /bin let alone xz.  The 
>> FHS is really old and doesn't address either.
> 
> Ouch. Bad decision on the part of the distros IMO. I'd definitely
> consider that an issue not to have tar and/or bzip2 on the root
> partition for recovery purposes. tar -> bz2 is fairly common for backups
> as far as inexpensive solutions. Most of your tape drives have hardware
> compression, but external HDDs are perfect for home users and SMEs. I
> mean, you can buy 15 external HDDs (with plenty of room for growth) for
> the price of a sufficiently large tape drive now days.
> 
>> The thing is that there is one symlink that would be broken with your 
>> suggested changes, lzmore, but it seems inconsistent to have 
>> lz{cmp,diff,grep,{,e,f}grep,less} in one directory and lzma,unlzma, and 
>> lzcat in another.  The same logic goes for the xz* files.
>>
>> I note that we do split bzip2 files in the way you suggest.
>>
>> I'd like to get other opinions on this.

> Anyway, back on topic, since it is fresh in my head, CLFS puts all xz
> utils in /bin but I do not know the rational. 

They are using XZ Utils-4.999.9beta, but that may not make a difference.

There are a lot of programs that can go into /bin.   What about wget? 
zip? vim?   On the other hand, some files in /bin seem somewhat 
arbitrary.  Whay is tcsh there?  time? date?

At one time we wanted to make /sbin and /bin as small as possible 
because of disk space.  Mine are about 5M each.  /lib is 16M. The 
smallest disk you can buy new is probably 40GB ($17).  You can even get 
a 1G thumb drive for ($5).  Today size is really a non-issue.

We might want to mount /usr from another system so we can update all 
systems at once.  To me that is another disk size issue that is 
obsolete.  rsync is probably easier than nfs mounting.  I would think 
that very few people mount /usr remotely any more.

With that in mind, I am inclined to put newer utilities like xz in 
/usr/bin.

   -- Bruce
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