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by jhanschoo 2482 days ago
Interestingly, some distros have undone/are undoing the usr split, fedora around 2012 and Debian still ongoing, see https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge and its associated links
4 comments
microtonal 2482 days ago
On NixOS:

    % find /bin /usr
    /bin
    /bin/sh
    /usr
    /usr/bin
    /usr/bin/env
/usr and /bin are only there to provide sh and env for compatibility with shell scripts.
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mcguire 2481 days ago
If nothing is in /bin or /usr/bin, where do proggies live? And what does your path look like?
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microtonal 2481 days ago
In the Nix store (/nix):

    % which cp
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/cp
Each package has its own path in the nix store:

    % readlink $(which cp)
    /nix/store/l96gc2qb8ysnf5hcq1hp5a3r6x905rf4-coreutils-8.31/bin/cp
The current system and previous systems also live in the store (Nix has atomic upgrades/rollbacks). Each system can be seen as a package with symlinks to binaries, man pages, etc. in the store. More information about the motivation behind Nix's approach can be found in Nix Pill 1:

https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/why-you-should-give-it-a-t...

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marcosdumay 2481 days ago
In NixOS, they are probably under some directory with a random name.

This is the OS where each binary runs with a different path and library path, with only the programs it needs (on the versions it needs) linked there.

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ape4 2482 days ago
Yes, the UsrMove project. It is great leadership to go to the trouble to fix things like this. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove
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flukus 2482 days ago
Why are they going from /bin to /usr/bin instead of /usr/bin to /bin ? I would have thought they could flatten things out.
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jhanschoo 2482 days ago
A goal of Fedora was to have a "snapshottable" /usr that includes as much as possible (all?) of the generic OS files. That is, multiple machines running the same OS can have a shared /usr, and everything machine-specific in the other dirs.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove#Why_don.E2.8...

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0xfffafaCrash 2482 days ago
> Myth #11: Instead of merging / into /usr it would make a lot more sense to merge /usr into /.

> Fact: This would make the separation between vendor-supplied OS resources and machine-specific even worse, thus making OS snapshots and network/container sharing of it much harder and non-atomic, and clutter the root file system with a multitude of new directories.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor...

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__s 2482 days ago
Weird edge cases where /usr is mounted, such as a read only network drive
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__s 2482 days ago
Arch too, https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requi...
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