Debian is in development to upgrade its default model of mapping file system. The new strategy has emerged with the unification of /usr directory.
To give developers the same ease that previously existed on distributions such as CentOS and Fedora, the Debian community has developed a new bootstrap option. This change is initially available in the unstable branch and targets to collect the entire file system under /usr directory for certain binaries.
“Debootstrap in unstable can now install with merged -/usr, that is with /bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr,” Debian dev Ansgar Burchardt writes in a blog post.
The plan of merging /usr initially pronounced late last year. While Debian is still one of the few Linux distributions with separate binary directories, it is now moving towards the unified /usr directory. This directory will have multiple subdirectories to access high-level directories from one single place.
The latest development by the Debian team has not yet completely unified the /usr directory. However, there are / and /usr as two default directories on distinct filesystems. It is considered to simplify the creation of read-only filesystems on the platform and resist malicious actions from removable media drives.
