Reindl Harald wrote: > schrieb Bob Proulx: > >They are producing gratuitous system differences for no good reason. > > not true - hence the symlink and "they" are in the meantime not only fedora, > google will show.... > > >And that is also why I don't understand the move from /bin/* to > >/usr/bin/* and the same for lib and others. That makes the "usr" part > >completely useless > > maybe you should read the page i linked > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove#Current_status > > the UsrMove is *not new* , happened years ago and happend on other unix > variants long before fedora while other Linux distributions followed in the > meantime
I never said it was new. HP-UX did this way back in version 11 way back in the day and I think Solaris or others also did something like this too. This isn't new. It isn't even specific to GNU/Linux distributions. Fedora is a late arrival to the scene with this. I said it creates gratuitous system differences for no good reason. Unless every system moves everything to /usr/bin then it will never be a standard or portable thing to do /usr/bin/bash (where "bash" may be replaced with any other program from there) for example. As long as there exists one legacy system without then it is a "gratuitous" difference. Someone will run "which foo" and find foo in /usr/bin/foo and then will hard code that into some software. And yet on another system it will remain in /bin/foo and that hard coded path won't work on both systems. That is bad. And the descriptive word "good" is subjective without any objective measurement (a weasel word) that also cannot be refuted easily. This is not a good thing to do. It is without good reason. > >It would be better to move everything from > >/usr/bin/* up to /bin/* instead and the same for lib and the others. > >I think they are moving things in the wrong direction. The primary > >location is /bin and /usr/bin was simply the secondary overflow > >location. But now they have lost the primary location and only have > >the secondary. That is the wrong direction. > > complete nonsense > > you can not move anything below /usr/ in the rootfs and if it only because > /usr/local and only move the contents of /usr/bin/ around breaks most setups > and shebangs - get rid of /bin and /sbin while place symlinks below / don't > inavlidate any existing reference Complete nonsense. There are only a very few commands that must exist in /usr/bin such as /usr/bin/env which must be accessible there. Almost no other program is required to be reached by the /usr/bin path. Any program that hard codes in the full path was never portable before. I can't tell you how many times I ran into porting issues because different systems had different binaries in /bin versus /usr/bin and yet someone hard coded the full path. Relying upon those locations was always wrong. Moving programs out of /usr/bin into /bin would not break any portable program. It might break some badly written software. That would be a good thing because those portability problems would get exposed and would get fixed. And the fix for those is a trivial removal of the full hard coded path from the string improving the quality of the software. As to /usr/lib is there any reason it needs to be at that location? The user should never see that location. It is purely an internal implementation detail. There is no reason libraries could not be installed in /lib instead. I had a hard time reading your sentence and I did not understand how /usr/local fits into it. I didn't say anything about it. > /bin was for cases with /usr on a sepearte partition to contain only the > minimal tools for basic admin tasks and that never worked really well > because missing pieces and not much testing for that cases in real > operations Not quite. It was due to the physically small sizes of the media available at the time. Therefore by necessity what would fit would fit on the root disk and then the system would bootstrap itself to the full system with more disks. Since there was space on /usr it naturally was where things overflowed. Who here today hasn't overflowed into the current /home for something or another? It worked really well at the time that it was needed to be used. The problem was that it was forced by physical necessity. It was never logically needed. Therefore people have always forgotten and accidentally created problems. Such as using grep with PCRE libraries in /usr/lib before /usr was mounted and things like that. Because it wasn't logically needed people have been working against it forever. > it don't help you much that the teory is fine when tools are simply not > working in emergency mode because needed pieces are not mounted Non-sequitur. > >But of course this is a topic for other places not here. Sigh. > > indeed Sigh. Bob
