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

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:

> Hi!
>
> On Thu, 2011-12-15 at 13:43:19 -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
>> Roger Leigh wrote:
>> > I think an important point to consider is that /usr would not
>> > disappear.  It could be replaced by a symlink for new installs.
>> > This would permit older installs to continue to use /usr, but
>> > the files would end up on / for new installs.  So no changes
>> > to --prefix would be needed, and the Debian packages themselves
>> > could still provide files in /usr.
>> 
>> Didn't the hurd port try this several years ago? My impression was that
>> they didn't feel it had been worth the pain, perhaps it's not so easy.
>
> The old default was changed for GNU/Hurd not because the setup in itself
> was considered particularly painful, more because doing so for a single
> port w/o getting the distribution at large to agree this was something
> worth supporting was painful as overwrite problems were continuously
> introduced.
>
> regards,
> guillem

Plus you can not ship /usr as symlink in one package and as directory in
others. That triggers a file overwrite error during update (for the
package containing the symlink). We had this problem with packages
shipping files in /lib64 or /usr/lib64 in the past several times.

So if /usr is a symlink then everyone has to change to --prefix=/.
That is what makes linking /bin and /sbin to /usr/* easier. Less
packages to change.

MfG
        Goswin