To answer Alan's question - the main fault lies on the GNOME project and
the forcing for systemd down user's systems throats.
Additionally, as certina things were added to Linux to "enhance"
capabilities, the GNOME developers (apparently) *deliberately* placed
the programs in /usr/bin, instead of in the generally accepted place of
/bin.
Alan is correct - there is a deliberate cause of this debacle. Certain
folks (Lennart being one of many) *are* cramming their vision of Linux
on the whole community.
I have read severl folks defending their ignoring of the old protocol of
placing boot-required programs in /bin (and hence on root) as being
holdovers from "ancient history" and claiming that disk space is so
cheap these days that it "isn't necessary" to keep this distinction.
As a result of the GNOMEish forcing, some distros have even gone so far
as to *do away* with /bin - and have placed everything in /usr/bin with
compatibility symlinks as a holdover/workaround.
I lay this at the feet of GNOME, and thus, at the feet of RedHat.
Linux used to be about *choice* aand leaving up to the users/admins
about how they wanted to configure their systems. But certain forces in
the Linux marketplace are hell-bent on imitating Microsoft's "one way to
do it" thinking that they are outdoing the "evil empire's" evilness.
I fully understand systemd and see that it is a solution seeking a
problem to solve. And its developers, being nearly identical with the
set of GNOME developers, are forcing this *thing* on the Linux universe.
Certainly, the SystemV init system needed to have a way of
*automagically/automatically* handling a wider set of dependencies. When
we wrote if for System IV at Bell Labs in 1981 or so, we didn't have the
time to solve the problem of having the computer handle the dependencies
and moved the handling out to the human mind to solve by setting the
numerical sequence numbers. (I was one of the writers for System IV
init while a contractor.)
OpenRC provided a highly compatible and organic extension of the system,
and Gentoo has been happy for severl years with it. But now, the same
folks who are thrusting GNOME/systemd down the throats of systems
everywhere, have invaded or gained converts enought in the Gentoo
structure to try and force their way on Gentoo.
Gentoo may be flexible enough to allow someone to write an overlay that
moves the necessary things back to /bin (and install symlinks from
/usr/bin to /bin) so that an initrd/initramfs is not required. But I
suspect that Gentoo and many distributions are too far gone down the
path of deception to recover.
Neil and other may disagree with this assessment, but I saw it coming
and this is not the first time it has been pointed out - and not just by me.
Who knows though? I may just have to abandon prepared distributions
completely and do a Linux From Scratch solution, or fork some distro and
tey to undo the worst of the damage.
--
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwo...@gmail.com
