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

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Bug#652011: general: Repeated pattern of FHS violation: Dependencies of /sbin and /bin, belong in /lib"):
> 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,

The situation we have, where this is something we vaguely try to do
but don't spend a lot of effort on, is IMO perfectly reasonable.

For example, it would be possible for someone who wanted to make a
Debian derivative which shipped with a separate /usr by default to go
and fix all of these bugs, and we shouldn't make that impossible by
deliberately conflating / and /usr or by rejecting the bug reports.

> 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.

If we want to relax the policy, we could say "in principle we think
this is a nice to have but whether to support it is up to maintainers
of individual packages".

Let's please not go straight to deliberately breaking it for the sake
of tidiness.

Ian.