Ubuntu should move all binaries to /usr/bin/

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 11:26:01PM -0800, Dane Mutters wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 11:23 PM, Dane Mutters <dmutters at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've seen a bit of this obscuring mentality creep into modern Linux
> > (including Ubuntu), in the form of auto-generated /etc/ stuff--which isn't
> > necessarily a bad thing, except when you can't easily change what's getting
> > generated (GRUB 2, anyone?

FWIW, grub.cfg is deliberately in /boot, rather than putting an
autogenerated file in /etc.  (/boot/grub/menu.lst had its own problems,
as a partly-autogenerated and partly-manually-maintained file - a scheme
that might almost have been designed to create bugs.)

> > Yes, by dumping everything into /usr/bin, you might make binaries easier
> > to find for basically Linux-illiterate users who probably wouldn't know
> > what to do with the binaries once they found them.  You would, however,
> > make things very difficult for any sysadmin, power-user, or person trying
> > to learn Linux's guts, as well as anybody else (who didn't design the
> > system or spend days/weeks reading about it...) who might actually have a
> > good reason to be mucking around in those areas (i.e. not be on his way to
> > screwing it all up through ignorance or recklessness)--that is, if things
> > are linked or otherwise obscured.

Quite so.

> > So, if the Ubuntu developers really do want to simplify the filesystem
> > structure,

Quite frankly: there has been no discussion among Ubuntu developers
about doing anything of the kind, and I seriously doubt that it would
ever make it onto our to-do list which has more than enough on it
already without making work for ourselves.  The suggestion on this list
of moving binaries to /usr/bin hasn't been made by Ubuntu developers.

If it ever came up as a serious prospective Ubuntu development project,
I would argue strongly against it on the grounds that the gains, if any,
would be negligible compared to the work involved and the bugs that
would be likely to be created.  Simplifications here belong at higher
levels.  For example, the suggestion made somewhere in this thread that
there's no good reason for Firefox to require the full path to an
executable to open a resource seems like an excellent one.  It should
rarely be necessary to care about the full path to an executable at all,
never mind attempting to consolidate them all into one directory.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]