Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged “/usr” file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed.
In hoping to have the merged /usr layout ready in time for Debian 13 “Trixie”, yesterday that moratorium was repealed. Debian’s UsrMerge Wiki page tracks the effort for those wishing to learn more about this modernization of the directory structure.
Debian’s merged /usr transition will hopefully be all wrapped up in time for the Debian 13 release in about two years time.
They still ask package developers to coordinate with the team instead of proactively moving stuff to /usr so it might take a while to finish.
Why does every modern distro put their stuff in /usr instead of the regular dirs (bin, lib)?
Edit: Apperently, /usr is for user-space stuff nowadays.
The argument was that if you put all your static resources in /usr, you can mount it RO (for integrity, or to use a ROM on something embeddedish) or from a shared volume (it’s not uncommon to NFS mount a common /usr for a pool of managed similar machines).
…that said, many of the same people who made that argument are also the ones that went with making it so systemd won’t boot without /usr populated anymore, so that feature is now less useful because it has to be something your initramfs/initcpio/whatever preboot environment mounts rather than mounted by the normal fstab/mount behavior, and the initcpio/initramfs/dracut schemes for doing that all (1) require a redundant set of tools and network configs in the preboot (2) are different and (3) are brittle in annoying ways.
It still works OK if you’re using a management tool like Warewulf to manage configs and generate all the relevant filesystems and such, but it’s a lot more fucking around than a line in fstab to mount usr once the real system is up like the old days.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged “/usr” file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium.
In hoping to have the merged /usr layout ready in time for Debian 13 “Trixie”, yesterday that moratorium was repealed.
Debian’s UsrMerge Wiki page tracks the effort for those wishing to learn more about this modernization of the directory structure.
"This page tracks Debian support for the merged /usr directories scheme, i.e. the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/. "
In addition, restructuring uploads should be targeted at experimental, and left for three days.
If there is any doubt as to whether a change you wish to make is appropriate, please seek explicit approval from the transition driver(s)."
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