On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 03:22:11PM -0500, R A Montante, Ph.D. via Dng wrote:
> So I'm looking at upgrading my main box to Excalibur, did a backup machine
> earlier, performed "usr-merge" first followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade", and
> so far it's working fine....
>
> Philosophically I'm skeptical of the merged bin/sbin/etc idea, but mostly on
> the grounds of "if it ain't broke don't fix it".  It kind of irks me to be
> told I have to do that, but it actually simplifies the directory structure a
> bit.  On the other hand, the multiplicity of partitions/disks made sense
> when when a 5-MB hard drive was a major investment, but these days my /home
> gets its own multi-terabyte drive, and the whole rest of the operating
> system can go anywhere that the machine knows how to boot from --- a 16GB
> usb drive is way overkill for a basic productivity system, for the price of
> a Happy Meal.
>
> And if I understand it, it's just a few command chains like "rsync -a /sbin
> /usr/sbin && rmdir /sbin && ln -s /usr/sbin /sbin".  No big deal?
> So is there any downside to the usr-merge, on today's systems?

Note that you sould (must?) have the links as *relative* pathnames,
i.e. like:
     ln -s usr/sbin /sbin

Otherwise the directory tree under / is not "self contained" and
"transportable". E.g. if you "rsync -x / /backup", you will want
"/backup/sbin/X" be a link to "/backup/usr/sbin/X" and not a link to
"/usr/sbin/X".

Ralph.

>
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