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Re: merged /usr considered harmful (was Re: Bits from the Technical Committee)



Am Freitag, dem 16.07.2021 um 10:09 +0200 schrieb Thomas Goirand:
> Merging binaries in /usr and getting rid of /bin and /sbin, at the
> end,
> WILL be an improvement. Debian cannot be the last distro not doing
> the
> move, I hope you understand that.
> 
> Also, I'm having a hard time understanding why moving binaries around
> should just break any system

Well, I'm only an interested SysOp here, but I share his reluctance to
embrace getting rid of /sbin and /bin. FHS 3.0 explicitely states that
/usr is allowed to be not only on a separate partition, but even on a
network device shared by other machines:

Quoting FHS 3.0, chapter 4.1, Purpose of /usr: 
'/usr is the second major section of the filesystem. /usr is shareable,
read-only data. That means that /usr should be shareable between
various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written to.'

On the other hand /bin and /sbin need to be on the root partition in
case mounting of other partitions doesn't work (as in "no network
available").

Quoting FHS 3.0, chapter 3.16.1, Purpose of /sbin:
'/sbin contains binaries essential for booting, restoring, recovering,
and/or repairing the system in addition to the binaries in /bin.
Programs executed after /usr is known to be mounted (when there are no
problems) are generally placed into /usr/sbin.'

So yes, with getting rid of /bin and /sbin you break the systems
emergency resilience and deviate from a known and not really that old
standard. I'm not quite sure how this is an improvement - rather I'm
curious how one could perceive this as such. For all I've seen in my
time as a SysOp, I'd rather have my emergency tools in /sbin and /bin
than booting a live system every time a server has broken mounts.

That all said, I'm not fully against the change, I just don't see the
benefit but instead quite a lot of problems down the road.

BR
Jo

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