[arch-general] lib -> usr/lib

[Joerg Schilling]

Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> hmmm, I think I've brought this up before and forgotten the response,
> something along the lines of they are not static anymore anyway. They
> are atleast majoratively on OpenBSD.

*BSD ignored most FHS agreements from 1987 and unfortunately Linux followed 
this.

> I believe /bin, /sbin aka the root, etc. traditionally contained
> static binaries so you would have a highly reliable working core system
> with just say a 50 Mb / partition that you could easily hack and
> restore and rarely remount for example.

See my recent post for the real historical background.

/sbin was created for SunOS-4.0 for the few (at that time static) binaries 
that are needed in order to bootstrap the multi-user mode.

At the same time, /usr/etc was renamed to /usr/sbin.

> I welcome the read-only root though and I haven't looked and forget
> some of the complexities at play.

There have been some other changes before 1987, that allowed to have /usr 
read-only - as required by the berkely "nd" driver that introduced the ability 
to boot diskless clients. These changes however have been introduced as a hack 
and many symlinks have been introduced to work around files that have been on 
/usr but need to be writable (e.g. /usr/spool).

With SunOS-4.0 and the FHS UNIX summit in 1987, /var and /opt have been 
introduced.

Jörg

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