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



On 14.12.2011 06:00, Russ Allbery wrote:

> 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.

nod.

I had to move a couple of libraries myself in the past and it's a
laborious task (and I've often seen it not done right).
E.g. while moving the library file to /lib, you should keep the devel
files (.so symlink, .a/.la files, pkg-config files) in /usr/lib.
You can't just move the .so symlink around, so you need to do it manually.

The problem is, that the major build systems (autoconf/automake, cmake)
don't have support for such split installations.

> 
> 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.
> 

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea to simply move
everything to /usr, and make /(s)bin and /lib symlinks.

While I personally never found it very useful to put /usr on a separate
partition, I acknowledge that such installations are around (especially
since d-i presents this partitioning scheme in such a prominent way) and
we must not break such installations on upgrades. We'd have to make
sure, that for such installations e.g. a initramfs is installed, which
can mount /usr.

That said, I'd also like to see us deprecate a separate /usr altogether.
And a first step would be to update d-i to no longer present this option.

Michael
-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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