packages being essential but having stuff in /usr/?!

[Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@scientia.net>]

Hi.

I wonder why this never came up before,.. or did it an I'm just blind?

I've just read parts of POSIX, where echo is more or less deprecated in
favour of printf
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html#tag_20_37_16).
Whether users will do this or not is a different question but I've seen
that Debian/corutils ships echo in /bin, but printf in /usr/bin.
The same for many other binaries part of coreutils.

Now coreutils is marked as essential, right?!
This means per policy section 3.8
(http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#s3.8):
"Essential is defined as the minimal set of functionality that must be
available and usable on the system at all times"

As far as I understand,.. it's fully ok, to have /usr on a separate
(i.e. non-root-) filesystem. 

That however would mean, that even outsite initramfs images (which are
probably a special case and do not count) many of corutils' binaries are
not _always_ available.

People would again have to check for them in e.g. their initscripts, or
basically everything before /usr is mounted, e.g. via NFS.


The same might be a problem with other essential packages, too.


Cheers,
Chris.

btw: Personally, I'd support to stop using echo,.. it's not really
portable...