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
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
ArchLinux symlinks /sbin, /bin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin. And also /lib, /lib64, /usr/lib64 to /usr/lib:

$ ls -la / | grep -e bin -e lib lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 6 23:41 bin -> usr/bin lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 6 23:41 lib -> usr/lib lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 6 23:41 lib64 -> usr/lib lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Dec 6 23:41 sbin -> usr/bin

>>hpb42+hE
I'm actually a bit surprised about `/bin` there. Maybe it's archaic but I've always considered the point of `/bin` to be a minimal set of tools that could allow an otherwise-hosed system to be booted/debugged. So it (and `/lib` and a few other directories) might be on a small, read-only partition while `/usr` and friends are on a much larger read-write partition.

Of course in the last twenty-five years I don't think I've ever really used a system set up like that. But it does seem nice to at least be able to do so.

>>stouse+j12
IIRC, you are correct. And OpenBSD still sets up distinct partitions for `/bin` and `/lib` etc.

The first PC I built had 7 disk drives in a tower case, four distinct hard drives. Yes it was crazy. But the largest of these by far was 540 MB. It made sense to keep the boot stuff on its own hard drive.

Linux has `boot`, of course, but `boot` should never appear in $PATH. I think.