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Debian GNU/Linux 9 'Stretch' Installer Gets GNU Screen, Linux Kernel 4.7 Support (softpedia.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the playing-at-the-multiplex dept.

"Debian developer Cyril Brulebois was pleased to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability of the eighth Alpha development snapshot of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 'Stretch' installer," reports Softpedia. An anonymous reader quotes their article: It's been four long months since Alpha 7 of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" hit the testing channels back in July, but the wait was worth it as the Alpha 8 release adds a huge number of changes, starting with initial support for the GNU Screen terminal multiplexer and lots of debootstrap fixes, which now defaults to merged-/usr.

"debootstrap now defaults to merged-/usr, that is with /bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr (more details on: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/09/msg00269.html)," wrote Cyril Brulebois in the mailing list announcement, where it states that default debootstrap mirror was switched to deb.debian.org.

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. All linked in /usr ? by psergiu · · Score: 5, Informative

    All binary & lib dirs linked in /usr ?
    That's incredibly STUPID
    Don't they know why /usr existed in the 1st place ?

    Story time:

    Back in the days when today's grumpy old beardy Unix Admins were young PFYs, the Unix operating system and it's ilk were gaining more and more libraries and utilities.
    Unfortunately the hard drives at the time were very small so / was running out of space. Thus a new hard-drive was mounted at /usr, and all the binaries and libraries not needed to boot the system into multiuser were moved from /bin, /sbin & /lib into /usr/bin, /usr/sbin & /usr/lib.
    This also allowed universities to have labs full of workstations with very small and cheap HDDs and NFS-mount a single /usr (as read-only) to all of them. New software needed on all workstations ? Just put-it on the shared /usr

    So:

    Those days we have large enough storage devices for huge / partitions and cheap enough that we don't need to NFS-mount them on lots of computers.

    If you don't want to have binaries & libraries separated into / and /usr/ JUST PUT EVERYTHING IN / DAMMIT !

    --
    1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
    1. Re:All linked in /usr ? by lordlod · · Score: 4, Informative

      All binary & lib dirs linked in /usr ? That's incredibly STUPID Don't they know why /usr existed in the 1st place ?

      Story time: [...]

      Of course they know why /usr existed in the first place, the article references two discussions about the merits and downsides of such a move. To me the critical argument is that the original use case you cited of late mounting /usr to a networked filesystem is already broken, mostly by udev, and fixing it is not realistic or worthwhile.

      As for shifting everything to root, I agree reflexively but there are advantages to having /usr, high on the list is the fact that people expect it and that it is the approach that Fedora takes. A move like that would impose considerable work on the entire ecosystem without any clear benefit.

      The Bottom Line though is this is a change to the default. Debian does and will continue in the future to support both arrangements. So long as people see advantages in having a separated /bin and /usr/bin and configure their systems that way they will continue to exist as a configurable option.

    2. Re:All linked in /usr ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Of course they know why /usr existed in the first place, the article references two discussions about the merits and downsides of such a move. To me the critical argument is that the original use case you cited of late mounting /usr to a networked filesystem is already broken, mostly by udev, and fixing it is not realistic or worthwhile.

      I'm not sure that they remember why the path existed in the first place. I remember the unnecessary joining of /usr/local and /usr/X11R6. I am pretty sure they also forgot that the 'S' in sbin stands for static und not superuser.

      Regardless of this it is a bad design decision to change a well thought out file system layout because someone misplaced their files (Hello udev, hello systemd). That would have been far easier changes with less repercussions and kept the system more flexible.