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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

I was curious why they are making the change now so I skipped right to the "benefit to fedora" section. They do not mention mounting /usr RO anywhere. Was this brought up in previous discussions? I do not understand why merging bin and sbin allows for mounting /usr RO.

The two issues seem totally unrelated to me. /usr/bin and /usr/sbin are directories under /usr. Why does making sbin a symlink allow for mounting /usr RO?

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I think GP was saying that it’s /usr/bin rather than /bin for mounting as readonly. Not that merging any particular sbin with bin serves the purpose of readonly mounting.

Disclaimer: I’m mostly just a Mac user/interested spectator. It’s possible I’m misunderstanding GP, and it’s not clear to me why the /usr distinction matters for readonly mounting either. But I couldn’t help jumping in to see if I could help clarify something, because there are just an astonishing number of ambiguities and confusions about those ambiguities throughout the comments on this post!

Because in this day and age on Fedora, there's practically zero difference between sbin and bin.

You could separate it I guess correctly between system-only bins again, but you'd break existing software that's hardcoded sbin and bin.

I think I am missing something obvious. I apologize for being dense.

What does the fact that "there's zero difference between sbin and bin" have to do with mounting /usr read only?

This change has nothing to do with it. The entire thread here is more talking about the usr-merge specifically (I think).

Thank you. I think you are correct.

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