/usr merge and the tail wagging the dog

Fedora 16 17 is will probably be the end of the line for me.

Really wanted to keep my hand in, there, since I still need to take the LPIC level 2. But there are a few guys in there who are all gung ho over ripping out the flooring and restructuring the entire Linux file system layout to match their vision of layout of some other so-called operating system.

Microsoft envy. And hubris. Hubris without utility.

Here's what I'm fighting:

• /sda1: some boot-up partition for MSWindows. 7.
• /sda2: the usual "C:" partition with "System" and "Program Files", etc. 
• /sda3: the usual "D:" partition, except it contained a bunch of stuff for the bundled utilities, install packages and the like. If it weren't for the program to update my wireless router, I'd junk the whole of the MSWindows system.
• /sda4: the "restore" partition. Doesn't work, for what it's worth. Just breaks anything you installed since the last time you tagged it.

I suppose the C: partition had to be a MiSeryDOS basic partition. Would have been nice if they could have put it in a "logical" (i. e., nested in the extended) partition. But, noooo, Microsoft doesn't have any motivation for making it easy to install any other OS on the box for dual-booting, especially not a "competitor's" OS.

D: and the restore partition --No, there is no valid technical reason not to put those in a logical partition. Not that they (Lenovo) have any motivation to make it easy to install an alternate OS on the box, either, especially with the kickback from Microsoft. ("Volume" discounts only available to "A" rated integrators and OEMs, where "A" includes deliberately getting in the way of Microsoft's competition with games like these.)

Not that it would have helped. The restore function is hard-wired, against all technical reason, to the vendor installed partition layout. So the end result would be the same.

I described the above and how I originally installed Fedora 16 on the box elsewhere.

The way I did that, /sda4 ended up at 14.5 gigabytes. I little on the large side for a bot partition, but it has to be the boot partition because the boot partition has to be a basic partition, and there are only four of those, and /sda3 has to be a basic partition so it can be the enclosing extended partition for the other partitions I cut for the install: /usr, /home, /var, /tmp .

Now it's Fedora 16's end-of-life. Time to update to Fedora 17.

But.

Some hot-heads (apparently spearheaded by a group at freedesktop.org) got a bee in their bonnets about how "Everything ought to be in /usr. There is no technical reason to separate them now."

Makes me want to swear. Yes there are plenty of technical reasons, security, stability, and simply having a bit of division of purpose.

And Microsoft envy is not a good reason for changing that.

Sure, we no longer have the sort of situation they had in the early days when drives were small and you wanted to have all the stuff you needed to boot up in one set of directories and all the rest in another. Right?

lvm in /usr instead of /bin is a pain, yeah.

Plymouth in /usr is liveable, but it would be nice not to have to tell newbs why their cool start-up screens don't get loaded at startup. Yeah. I understand. But it's not a technical reason.

And ACLs (including the curious perversion of the concept that someone calls securelinux or something like that) mitigate the need to separate classes of binaries and libraries. Sure. I understand that you think such things.

You're wrong, but I understand that you think such things.

No, vendors never do stupid things like I described above, right?

RIGHT?

ARE YOU GUYS LISTENING?

No. You're not. I'm just a nameless slob, roadkill on your way to inventing reason for code churn and the accompanying job security.

I've lost about a month, total, to your need to prove how smart you are. A month of my time that I could have been writing bug reports on outstanding bugs. But it means nothing to you guys, because I'm a nameless slob out here in never-never-land.

When I hit the 15G limit on the root partition because /usr is packed and I can't put it on another partition because of your hubris, I'm gone.

Debian's engineers are smarter for the time being, but, if they roll over, shoot, configuring openbsd from scratch is going to take less time than figuring out work-arounds to your vanities.