Re: [PLUG] /bin and /sbin

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Amir Tahvildaran <amir@mathforum.org> wrote:
> After yesterday's meeting some of us were talking about the separation
> of /bin and /sbin and then I saw Fedora wants to merge them:
> http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fedora-Wants-To-Simplify-the-Linux-Filesystem-232141.shtml
>

Yup - on slashdot, and a few weeks ago this was a huge debate on the
gentoo-dev mailing list.

The basic issue is that apparently booting without /usr available is
already broken on some configurations (mainly involving bluetooth -
like having a bluetooth keyboard).  The more complex udev rules rely
on stuff in /usr, and there is a huge pile of dependencies if you want
to move that stuff to the root.

Fedora is basically saying let's forget about the old way of doing
things and just stick everything in /usr and make our initramfs
smarter (dracut in their case - btw dracut is worth looking at as a
general initramfs tool).  Then you can put /usr on a read-only
filesystem and just about everything associated with your distro is in
one place, which isn't a bad idea for when you have a million clones
of a single config in a datacenter.

The debate on gentoo-dev basically was whether we should try to beat
them or join them.  We aren't making the move, but the thought was to
provide the tools to mount /usr in initramfs or early during boot for
users who want to put it on a separate filesystems.

Rich
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