[Discuss] Debian 12 vs. WSL 1

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Derek Martin wrote: 
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 10:05:54AM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> > Debian 12 was released last week(end). With it comes the mandatory
> > change to merged /usr.
> 
> 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..."

The original split was a hack caused by not having big enough
disks. Remember that there's a cycle caused by adapting to tech
and another cycle caused by adapting to politics:


Tech: disks aren't big enough, let's split into two directories
so one has the tools necessary for the system to boot and the
other has all the others. Ooh, we keep overflowing filesystems
and breaking the system: can we mount different partitions? And
different disks? But that's a mess, so can we keep them all on
the same combination of disks?

Politics: how do I keep my OS binaries separate from the ones I
installed, separate from the ones that I'm installing from a
commercial software company, separate from the GNU stuff that
isn't built in, separate from the stuff that I can't share
across machines of different architectures...

-dsr-