> On Apr 8, 2016, at 8:42 PM, William Hubbs <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Fri, Apr 08, 2016 at 03:20:24PM -0700, Daniel Campbell wrote: >> Based on what I've read here in the thread, merging /bin and /sbin >> into /usr/{sbin,bin} is a matter of convenience by putting most of the >> static parts of a running system into a single path. As mentioned by >> some people, however, that's not enough to make deployment across >> multiple machines super simple. The distros that focus on that aren't >> rolling release like we are, and thus don't face the same difficulties >> that we do. In addition, Gentoo supports a broad number of choices for >> users and some are advocating for an option. > > It is true that we offer a high degree of choice to users, but one of > those choices is not which paths to install binaries and libraries > into. >
Sure we do. Users can do pretty much whatever convoluted file system hierarchy layout they want prior to unpacking the stage3 -- multiple volumes, symlinks or bind-mounts to combine dirs, etc etc. IMO support for this usr-merge should be left to that level of system configuration, as long as portage/other PMs support installing packages in such a way that the contents of /bin and /usr/bin don't collide with each other at merge time. In other words, we should not drop any form of support at all for non-usr-merged systems. Which means all of that ebuild cleanup WilliamH wants to do cannot happen. Which, IMO, makes the whole thing moot.
