Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge

Posted Jun 2, 2023 13:02 UTC (Fri) by dh (subscriber, #153)
In reply to: Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge by bluca
Parent article: Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge

Hi,

---
dh@<Ubuntu-23.04-machine>:~$ ls -al /
[...]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Mai 17 09:15 bin -> usr/bin
[...]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Mai 17 09:15 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mai 17 09:15 lib32 -> usr/lib32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mai 17 09:15 lib64 -> usr/lib64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mai 17 09:15 libx32 -> usr/libx32
[...]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Mai 17 09:15 sbin -> usr/sbin
---

I was surprised myself when I discovered that some days ago - and totally unrelated to this discussion here.

Ciao, Dirk

Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge

Posted Jun 2, 2023 15:17 UTC (Fri) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link] (2 responses)

You misunderstood. bluca was talking about keeping /bin, /lib etc. directories & symlinking _the entries_ inside the directories, e.g.

/bin/sh → /usr/bin/sh
/bin/ls → /usr/bin/ls
/lib/libc.so.6 → /usr/lib/libc.so.6

etc.

This was discussed as an alternative to symlinking _the directories_ (/bin → /usr/bin, /lib → /usr/lib etc).

Pretty much all distros that have actually gone the "symlink the directories" way; SuSE attempted "symlink entries inside the directories" but rolled that back as bluca said due to massive problems with that approach.

Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge

Posted Jun 6, 2023 12:50 UTC (Tue) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, I had misremembered then from what was discussed back then. I would have found that other approach cleaner but it is what it is. At the time, i was on my phone and couldn't actually check on my own system.

Seeking the endgame for Debian's /usr merge

Posted Jun 6, 2023 14:18 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

It is not cleaner, it's doomed to fail. We know this because we've seen it happen.