On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 13:02 -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 01:50:25PM -0500, Olivier Crête wrote:
> > I don't see what breakage would be caused by a big-bang update (move
> > everything in /sbin,/bin/,usr/sbin to usr/bin and add symlinks. I really
> > doubt any system has a /usr so tight that adding the couple things that
> > are in / to /usr/bin would break it.. Btw, this also includes /lib*
> > to /usr/lib*.
> 
> I think the best way to do this part of it is going to be to just follow
> the upstream packages. When they release a new version that installs in
> /usr, just allow that to happen. Eventually there will be very little in
> /{bin,sbin,lib}, maybe nothing  besides a couple of symbolic links like
> /bin/sh.
> 
> I am not for what fedora is doing with the
> /bin->/usr/bin, /sbin->/usr/sbin and /lib->/usr/lib symlinks.

At least the upstreams that work for RedHat and Suse (and that's almost
all system packages) will come to expect that these symlinks exist. For
example, I just heard that kmod will expect kernel modules
in /usr/lib/modules even though the kernel installs them
in /lib/modules.. So yes, upstream will force these symlinks on us too.

A couple years ago, Gentoo was the forward looking distribution, ready
to try radical changes that break existing assumption, like our init
scripts with dependencies or our early use of udev. These days, I see so
much resistance to progress, it makes me sad.


-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer