rawhide report: 20101019 changes

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 19:58, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Peter Jones (pjones at redhat.com) said:
>> Because we haven't decided to merge those together. That's really the only
>> reason - there's no over-arching technical reason they need to be separate.
>> It's entirely a historical consideration.
>
> Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I remember a UNIX where /bin, /lib,
> and so on were just symlinks to /usr/bin, /usr/lib, and so on.


There were several depending on how it was implemented. The Convex I
remember having a minimal /etc and /bin and then mounting the real
ones later in the boot but really in /usr/etc, /usr/bin etc. The OSF/1
systems I think did it with symlinks.

But out of the weeds.. the big areas I know were using separate /usr
with Fedora were disk-less systems. The /usr , /opt and some other
items were NFS mounted from a central system. It was mostly a relic of
how Sun had done it in the good old days but no one had come up with a
better 'supported' way and so it was still in use til quite recently.

/usr ends up being mounted separate mostly for business case reasons.
The compliance documents say /usr on all systems in some place must be
a seperate partition and until they get updated that is how it will
be. On other areas it is separated out because the business software
requires it or it won't install. [Yes brain dead but it is what it
is.] Neither of those are really in Fedora's sphere since it is more
of a cutting edge versus practical OS. [Yes that is a dig.. I am
allowed one per year.]

If we are going to 'break' FHS, let us do it in a large way versus a
death by a thousand cuts. Change the directory names to something
like:

/configurations
/vendor-binaries
/vendor-data
/user-stuff

or any of the other proposals over the years to make things more
intuitive in a 21st century way :).



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines