Re: from / to /usr/: a summary

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Just a quick side-note.

Marco d'Itri wrote:

> Some changes are coming from upstream and we will have to either embrace
> them or actively revert them.

There is a third option: help upstream to maintain what they consider
the "legacy" alternative.  Many upstreams, including at Red Hat, seem
to be willing to work with downstream packagers that contribute
patches.

Of course that has nothing to do with the real motivation no one has
mentioned, which is that deciding for each binary whether to put it in
/bin or /usr/bin is a pain in the neck.  It very well may be sensible
to tweak the boot process to mount /usr sooner to avoid that trouble.
The main technical difficulty seems to be platforms where it is common
to boot without an initramfs (for example, if it is hard to
reconfigure the bootloader and the bootloader is already set up to use
a plain kernel).

Hope that helps,
Jonathan