Getting rid of /usr for F12?

[Ric Wheeler]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Fri, 17.04.09 06:48, Ralf Corsepius (rc040203 at freenet.de) wrote:
>>
>>> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>>> Heya,
>>>>
>>>> there's one topic that keeps popping up in various discussions: can't
>>>> we get rid of /usr? The seperation of / and /usr doesn't make much
>>>> sense anymore.
>>> This is a very short-sighed view.
>> Oh, is it?
>>
>>>> We could make /usr a symlink to / for an interims phase
>>>> and everything would be good for conservative folks who think the FHS
>>>> is the holy bible.
>>> Religiousity isn't the point - The point is: There are reasons for why  
>>> the FHS rsp. the GNU standards are setup the way they are.
>> First of all FHS is not a "GNU standard". 
>>
>> Secondly, it is of course very convincing if you just nebulously say
>> 'there are rasons' instead of mentioning any.
> 
> Well, sometimes the fact that something *is* standard is far more important
> than what the standard is.  And /usr has been around for a very long time,
> and lots of software (an people, for that matter) know that it's there.
> Much of the GNU configured software by default installs in /usr/local.
> There has to be a very high bar for changing common practice.
> 
> Andrew.
> 

I can't help chiming in here - as a sys admin back at Brandeis in the early 
eighties, I had a professor with root privileges try to "fix" the spelling of 
"usr" for us on the department Vax running BSD.

Needless to say, not much worked when I got in the next morning to find my 
"/usr" had been renamed "/user".

Not sure how much would break today, but at relative dawn of UNIX time, it was 
painful :-) (And I revoked he lost root access, tenure or not)

ric