Fedora considers moving all binaries to /usr/bin/

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Fedora-considers-moving-all-binaries-to-usr-bin-1369642.html

by sciurus • 15 years ago

5 8 15 years ago

spitfire2• 15 years ago

Why not move them all to /bin instead?

/usr is a relic of the times when unix systems were big hulking monsters the side of fridges. and hard disks the size of washing machines. You kept a separate /, /var, /usr, /home, etc because you had a lack of space and because disks kept crashing.

That's no longer the case. Even for the largest 4096cpu numa system you just throw the entire OS on one partition, with a separate home/data disk.

I'm sure the developers have some neckbeard reason why it has to be /usr and not / but surely user friendliness is not it.

veneratio• 15 years ago

While I'm new to the discussion, I agree with you spitfire. But at least this is a step towards something simpler. The current file structure for most distributions is downright confusing to even moderately competent users.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

What? It may take a minute to find where something actually is, but on all Unix-like OSes you can type `man hier` and have all the mystery swept away.

Moving everything to /bin strikes me more of a marketing move than anything.

makecheck2• 15 years ago

According to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [1], /bin was originally designed to hold programs that are "required when no other filesystems are mounted" or commands "used indirectly by scripts".

Which is a fancy way of saying that you don't want basic functionality to break just because a mounted volume is unresponsive for some reason.

The /bin versions of programs can also be less powerful (e.g. to keep them extremely small), although that's unlikely to be an issue these days. For example, when local disks were small it wasn't unusual to see a bare-bones /bin version of some program while also having a /usr/bin version that was capable of large file support and other niceties.

[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

spitfire2• 15 years ago

I know about all that. You're basically saying "lets stick with the past... just because.

If you're going to simplify things, do so in a meaningful way and keep up with the times.

ryanmarsh• 15 years ago

It took them until 2011 to come to this conclusion? It's been needlessly redundant for far to long.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

modular is not the same thing as redundant.

Fedora considers moving all binaries to /usr/bin/

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