Re:Debian considers merging /usr
by tobias12345 on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @11:44AM
(#13015296)
By splitting / and /usr you create problems for packagers: Where do all the files need to go?
Does cryptsetup need to go into /sbin or /use/sbin? Does network code belong into / or /use?
Must users will not care, but some might need either of them to set up their file systems.
If you pace something into /, then you also need to put all libraries and binaries that needs into /. That will rapidly blue up the size of /. It is also not automatically testable, so distributions will get things wrong (as they repeatedly did before).
You could have a script to only put the stuff your system needs into /... Most distributions use such a script for their initrd, which contains everything necessary to check and mount your root file system. So you could just extract that into / and be fine with it:-)
Or just use your initrd as that rescue medium.
Can Computer Science help us decide if some people are right?
The measure of Informational entropy : a state with more compartment as more order, thus more information. By merging /usr you lose information, thus making the one in need losing it, whereas the one without a need for this gain nothing.
I laughed at the comment of philosophy by pitchforks of angry users, and I would claim these pitchforks are the one from the Maxwell Daemons telling us to remember that it is easy to lose information and that increasing entropy is messy.