[Discuss] Debian 12 vs. WSL 1

[Rich Pieri]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2023 16:41:21 -0500
Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:

> I'm curious if this change is thought to have any genuine practical
> benefit, or if it's just the usual, "I'm a bored developer, time to
> break something completely arbitrarily, that's working perfectly fine,
> that people have been used to for literally decades, that will likely
> cause random obscure problems, simply because it does not uphold some
> arbitrary idea I have of design perfection..."

Things haven't been working perfectly fine. Ever find NIS or LDAP login
shells failing on some systems because BASH is /bin/bash on some of
them while it's /usr/bin/bash on others? Or have scripts fail to run
properly because they can't find /usr/bin/df and /usr/bin/du because
they're in /bin? I don't know about you but I've experienced problems
like these more times than I can remember. UsrMerge solves problems
like these, and others:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/

(NB: UsrMerge does not depend on systemd, the article just happens to
be in that space)

But what are the benefits of split usr? Well, if you're running Unix v6
on a PDP-11 with two 1.5MB disk packs, splitting the OS across the two
disk packs makes sense. Otherwise, there are no benefits whatsoever:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html

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