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Re: Bug#652011: general: Repeated pattern of FHS violation: Dependencies of /sbin and /bin, belong in /lib



Zachary Harris <zacharyharris@hotmail.com> writes:

> My understanding of the FHS would be that if a library is a dependency
> of a binary in /bin or /sbin, then such library belongs in /lib, not
> /usr/lib. (If for some reason the library is also desired in /usr/lib
> then a sym link from /lib to /usr/lib, but not the other way around, is
> acceptable.) A review of past bug reports (e.g. #633019 and #639939 from
> this summer) shows that this policy gets repeatedly violated in Debian
> until someone catches it.

I'm increasingly convinced by the recent discussion on debian-devel that
doing all the (rather substantial) work required to keep this separation
working is a waste of our collective time.  We're not doing a very good
job at it anyway, chasing all the library dependencies is a fair amount of
work, and things have to keep moving around as dependencies change.  And
this is all to support use cases that, while real, are fairly marginal in
my estimation.  This does not seem like the most effective place for us to
be spending our time.

I don't know if it's worth the effort to unify /bin and /usr/bin or the
other similar things that have been discussed from time to time, but I do
think it may be time for Debian to just officially say that we don't
support /usr on a (meaningfully) separate partition from /bin and /lib,
and that binaries in /bin may have dependencies on /usr/lib.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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