Julian Andres Klode <j...@debian.org> writes: > Having symlinks in /bin and so on would be unclean: We'd have to maintain > one symlink per binary in /usr. This is a lot of symlinks.
Does the quantity of symlinks matter? > We also cannot ever get rid of them - it would break the property. Well, on any given system, once every file in /bin was a symlink to the same-named file in /usr/bin and we had some guarantee that no new packages would break this property, we could in theory replace the entire directory with a symlink. Doing that feels like it would require new primitives in the package management software, though, and it might be hard to do safely. (It would also create a break point where packages from before that flag day could no longer be installed on the system.) > It also fails to handle subdirectories in lib{exec}. We do want > /usr/lib/systemd and /lib/systemd to be the same. You can use the same approach recursively and symlink every file. This is an old package manager trick that I think Nix is still using to this day, and which was used to some success by such things as GNU stow (albeit for different reasons). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>