On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 1:42 AM, zxq9 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 04/10/2012 02:22 PM, Tom H wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 8:18 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia<[log in to unmask]>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Bring popcorn. Fedora 17 is getting rid of /bin and /sbin, replacing the
>>> directories with symlinks to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.
>>
>> And don't be surprised if F18 merges "/usr/bin" and "/usr/sbin".
>
> This is either F18 or if something especially hard to adapt emerges then
> F19, but I think there is no stopping this. Reading the discussions about
> it, though, I haven't seen any solid defense of keeping /usr/{bin,sbin}
> separate other than "we've never merged them before". The trend is to define
> and support a Linux Standard and depart from pure POSIX wherever it seems
> OK. This doesn't necessitate abandonment of strong unixy cli tools, but a
> lot of people are forgetting that the cli is central between the
> computer-as-a-smartphone DE trend and the rewrite-every-subsystem-ever
> trend.
>
> Red Hat is a big fish in a small pond, but that the pond is indeed small is
> worth remembering. Hopefully this divergence from everything that came prior
> doesn't result in a further fracture of the Unix community on the scale of
> the 80's that set back computing a few decades.

I'm glad the filesystem's being simplified and I don't care that Unix
tradition's being broken if it's just that the path to binaries has
changed. Changing the filesystem layout doesn't mean that the CLI'll
be broken.

Solaris has also fully deprecated "/bin" and "/sbin" with Sol11; OSs evolve...

There have been posts on both debian-devel and ubuntu-devel expressing
opposition to a move to "/usr" for historical reasons so there's bound
to be fragmentation in the near future. If developers had stuck to the
old rationale for splitting binaries up between those under "/" and
those under "/usr" and splitting binaries up between "bin" and "sbin"
there'd be less of a rationale for merging any of these directories.