Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)

>>taubek+(OP)
I once sent out a proposal on the FreeBSD lists to merge /sbin with /bin, and /usr/sbin with /usr/bin. People were concerned that this would slow down the system, due to PATH lookups taking longer. Even when I demonstrated the opposite was true (it being faster due to fewer directories needing to be scanned), I wasn't able to get consensus. What a shame.

>>EdScho+Oa
Hypothetically speaking, would forking FreeBSD or a *nix to use a simpler folder structure be feasible? I can imagine a lot of package managers and applications make assumptions about the folder structure though, so there would have to be a lot of changes made to make everything work.

I was thinking "just symlink /sbin with /bin", but there would probably be conflicts.

>>Cthulh+wg
> Hypothetically speaking, would forking FreeBSD or a nix to use a simpler folder structure be feasible?*

Not only feasible but it's been implemented a few times over the years. The most notable being GoboLinux[1][2], which is nearly 20 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux

[2] https://gobolinux.org/

> I was thinking "just symlink /sbin with /bin", but there would probably be conflicts

Given how long /sbin et al have been around, there would always be some edge cases. However it is still possible to do. GoboLinux uses symlinks to achieve LFH[3] compatibility while still having friendly directory names. ArchLinux also just has one bin directory and uses symlinks for compatibility:

  » ls -l / | grep bin                                                                                                                                                                                   
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root              7 2021-12-07 02:41 bin -> usr/bin
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root              7 2021-12-07 02:41 sbin -> usr/bin

  » ls -l /usr | grep bin                                                                                                                                                                                
  drwxr-xr-x   5 root root 110,592 2022-05-06 09:23 bin
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root       3 2021-12-07 02:41 sbin -> bin

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

zlacker