zlacker

>>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
> What a shame.

I think this is a pretty dangerous attitude, and it is really the only thing wrong with Linux, and probably leads to replacement of simple structure and functionality with a complex software suite that is merely more convenient, like systemd. "Let's change this thing because we want to, because it will improve performance 0.0024%"

Feature creep is what happens when restraint was not exercised.

IMO, since it really doesn't matter what the filesystem looks like, leave it be for standards and compatibility. Seriously, it takes, idk, maybe, a lack of humility to want to change fundamental characteristics of UNIX when the reasons for doing so are a little capricious.

I'm not really talking about the parent, fwiw. I'm talking about the crowd and ochlocracy.

>>Maursa+De
It's also dangerous and tiring the opposite attitude in the Linux world: don't dare change something that has been there for 30 years. Like this very article, there were plenty saying "the /usr split is there for a reason!". No, it's just an historical quirk.

There's plenty greybeards that for them "Linux" is a full screen terminal running emacs on decade-old hardware. "I don't use antialiased fonts, why the hell should I care about decent HiDPI support?" And then protest every time some working group tries to modernise and improve the Linux desktop. You see them every time on this forum.

I'm a greybeard, I've used Linux full time on the desktop for 20 years. I don't get this conservative, "we don't need it" attitude.

>>sph+ug
> Like this very article, there were plenty saying "the /usr split is there for a reason!". No, it's just an historical quirk.

For those of us who ran small-disk NFS workstations back in the day having the split and a common /usr was no quirk and very useful. (There were also diskless (Sun, OpenFirmware netbooting) workstations: common /bin, /usr, but per-machine /var on the NFS server.)

The article states:

> Cheap retail hard drives passed the 100 megabyte mark around 1990, and partition resizing software showed up somewhere around there (partition magic 3.0 shipped in 1997).

Yeah, except if you have a fleet of several hundred or thousand workstations to provision. "Cheap" is relative, especially if you're an academic institution.

>>throw0+Sv
Even if a split was pragmatically warranted, the fact that the user directory was chosen is without a doubt a quirk, an accident of circumstance that has since been perpetuated out of tradition (or less charitably: cargo cult mentality.)