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It would break FreeBSD's single user mode when using the defaults during installation for partitioning.

FreeBSD's default install creates: /, /usr, /tmp, /var and swap space.

When you boot in single-user mode all you get is / and nothing else. If everything was in /usr you wouldn't be able to mount /usr ... :P

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Presumably if FreeBSD went down the same path as Fedora, they could also change the default partition layout.

Wouldn't that interfere with the core BSD system vs p ackage binaries/libs paradigm?

Packages/binaries/ports tree installs into /usr/local/.

See man hier [1].

For example, on a FreeBSD install, it is perfectly safe to rm -rf /usr/local/. Your system will still boot without issues.

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&...

Which I find is actually quite problematic; "make install" by default puts things into /usr/local, and I would prefer to distinguish between things I've installed and things ports have installed. (Specifically, I need to build my own mplayer, but I also need the ports version installed as some other ports depend on it).

Feel free to change the prefix passed to the packages you install by hand. /usr/local is the default used by almost all packages I am familiar with, if for example you want /opt you have to modify that yourself.

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