Re:Fedora 40 Plans To Unify /usr/bin and /usr/sbin
by ajross on Sunday December 24, 2023 @05:44PM
(#38757762)
> I understand the historical reasoning for the / vs /usr vs /usr/local split —
That was retconned, actually. My understanding is that the original "/usr" was a second RK05 disk pack added to an early system at Bell Labs for storing stuff owned/created/managed by "users" instead of the system folks. Space was precious in those days and RAID was still a decade in the future. You got your 2MB and had to decide where to mount it and what to put there.
Early Unix filesystems were an ad-hoc wreck, basically. Sun cleaned this up a lot as they moved (or tried to move) to NFS as the primary filesystem for workgroup installations, which is where we get the modern ideas from that you are tagging "historical". I believe (but am not sure) that "sbin" hails from this era.
Then Red Hat came by another decade later and further symmetrized the rules, but in the process essentially obsoleted the distinction between "/" and "/usr", etc...
That was retconned, actually. My understanding is that the original "/usr" was a second RK05 disk pack added to an early system at Bell Labs for storing stuff owned/created/managed by "users" instead of the system folks. Space was precious in those days and RAID was still a decade in the future. You got your 2MB and had to decide where to mount it and what to put there.
Early Unix filesystems were an ad-hoc wreck, basically. Sun cleaned this up a lot as they moved (or tried to move) to NFS as the primary filesystem for workgroup installations, which is where we get the modern ideas from that you are tagging "historical". I believe (but am not sure) that "sbin" hails from this era.
Then Red Hat came by another decade later and further symmetrized the rules, but in the process essentially obsoleted the distinction between "/" and "/usr", etc...