[Discuss] Debian 12 vs. WSL 1

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 06:49:40PM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
> As a hobby software developer, I see the benefit: *nix isn't static, so
> simplification is generally "a good thing". More power to those who use
> Occam's razor to trim some bloat.

I agree usrmerge is a good thing, but I'd say it's actually adding bloat
rather than trimming it: post-usrmerge there are (at least) two paths for
every binary, two linkings for every library. pre-usrmerge there was usually
just one on a given machine (even if different machines had different ones).

I'm glad there's a standard (even if it's a bloated standard, as standards
often are - he prefers x, but she prefers y? let's support both!); I'm glad
usrmerge requires less effort (via its bloat by supporting both path names),
and as bloat goes this certainly is pretty lightweight.  but it's actually
preserving the 1971 naming convention of having both /{bin,sbin,lib} and
/usr/{bin,sbin,lib} that was due to having 3mb of system files that had to
be split between the two 1.5mb disk packs mounted at / and /usr on a pdp-11.
(why /usr?  because that was originally the disk for users' home directories,
before / ran out of space and they started stealing disk space from the users 
for system files...)  actively enshrining that pdp-11's disk partition in
every future linux/*nix filesystem ain't what I'd call trimming bloat.

if we were trimming bloat we'd e.g. eliminate /bin, /sbin, /lib* completely
(or the reverse, eliminate /usr completely) and have just a single path for
each of these resources, but that would be a *lot* of work.  personally, I
strongly prefer the bloat-adding usrmerge solution which reduces effort.

yay for bloat!  (well, in this one case at least ;)
--grg