Getting rid of /usr for F12?

[Nathanael D. Noblet]

Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
>> Andrew Haley wrote:
>>
>>> Well, sometimes the fact that something *is* standard is far more
>>> important
>>> than what the standard is.  And /usr has been around for a very long time,
>>> and lots of software (an people, for that matter) know that it's there.
>>> Much of the GNU configured software by default installs in /usr/local.
>>> There has to be a very high bar for changing common practice.
>> Yeah, I agree. I mean I haven't really seen any *solid* reason for removing
>> /usr. What does it improve? What situation does it fix? It doesn't save a
>> massive amount of space, it doesn't increase performance, it doesn't resolve
>> any long standing bug I can see. A change like that for so little gain will
>> find it hard to gain traction I think.
>>
> 
> Not that I support or not support dropping /usr, but let's do this
> quick calculation:
> 
> Every day I spend 3 seconds in average to type /usr. I am pretty sure
> that it is safe to assume that there are at least 100000 people like
> me in the world. This makes 300000 seconds to type /usr every day in
> the world. 300000 seconds is not easy to ignore, and can be used for
> more useful and productive things, like replying to this topic. :p

why do you type /usr ? if you are going after a command its in the path 
already, so then maybe /usr/{share,doc,,,?} in which case use man X, or 
spend time improving and consolidating documentation readers for the 
case of /usr/share/doc/program-ver/random... in any case you still have 
to type /share/doc/program-.... or use tab completion. I don't see how 
removing /usr helps solve anything... if you are worried about the 3 
seconds, create a bunch of symlinks. Saves you time, doesn't break 
anything, uses next to no more space...?

I still don't see a *solid* reason to remove /usr. At least solid enough 
to justify the amount of work necessary to port all the packages over to 
new locations *particularly* when you'd probably want to have other 
distros on board as well. Its hard enough to find where something is in 
another distro because of minor naming stuff... Nevermind not following 
a common standard


-- 
Nathanael d. Noblet
T: 403.875.4613