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Comment by mort96

1 month ago

Ah. That makes sense.

It's so annoying how deeply UNIX packaging philosophy assumes that installation directories are something you hard-code at build time.

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mort96

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akerl_  1 month ago

The present is built mostly on layers of the long-past :)

It makes me think of when Arch merged /usr/bin and sbin with /bin and sbin. Having them split made sense in a ton of scenarios that used to be very common, but increasingly the split was vestigial for most users.

  • mort96  1 month ago

    Yea, my understanding is that the split between / and /usr used to be more or less: the drive they used for / ran out of space, so they mounted another drive as /usr. As a consequence, / became where you put stuff that was essential during early boot, while /usr was where you put everything else.

    But these days, "early boot" is handled by initramfs and we've all got drives large enough to not need the split anyway.