Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] A little help for non-native English speakers

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 2:09 PM, Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:
>
> IMHO that makes the name of the "/etc" directory all that much more
> entertaining.  As in Dennis R. and Ken T. couldn't be bothered to come up
> with more directory names than they had, e.g. /bin /lib /boot /var … (I
> can't be bothered to think of or look for more.)
>

Along those lines the original reason for the / vs /usr split was that
the original developers were accommodating a machine that had two hard
drives and needed to split things up.

There may very well be good reasons to preserve the distinction today,
but those aren't actually historical.  And of course there are two
modern approaches:

1.  The more traditional FHS approach of / for boot-essential and /usr
mounted later during bootstrapping.

2.  The Fedora /usr merge approach of sticking all read-only
distro-supplied files in /usr with the goal that they be contained and
read-only (think squashfs/signatures/etc), with bootstrapping covered
by the initramfs.

-- 
Rich