-"Merged /usr" describes a possible future standard directories scheme in which the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories have been made superfluous, either through making these symlinks to their /usr equivalents (/usr/{bin,sbin,lib}) or by removing them entirely.
-The motivation to get Debian systems to converge towards such a scheme is vastly documented elsewhere [0,1] but can be summarized as the following points:
- * having separate / and /usr filesystems has been useful in the past for booting without initramfs onto a minimal root filesystem that carried just enough to mount the /usr filesystem later in the boot process. Given the evolution of physical hosts' capabilities, initramfs'es have been default in Debian (and elsewhere) for a long time and most systems don't have an intermediate state during boot in which they have only / , but not /usr mounted anymore.
- * another use-case is to be able to share an identical /usr over a network link; hence booting an initramfs, mounting a local /, then mounting /usr over the network; an initramfs with everything needed to mount a filesystem over a network link is actually a smaller
- * booting with / only is not systematically tested in Debian;
- * the packaging infrastructure to install files outside of /usr is not standard and represents technical debt:
- * given its status as remnant "folklore", the distinction between what _needs_ to be shipped in / and what can stay in /usr is often interpreted arbitrarily;
- * allowing shipment of identically-named libraries or binaries in different paths can confuse common understanding of paths precedence.
+"Merged `/usr`" describes a possible future standard directories scheme in which the `/{bin,sbin,lib}/` directories have been made superfluous, either through making these symlinks to their `/usr` equivalents (/usr/{bin,sbin,lib}) or by removing them entirely.
+The motivation to get Debian systems to converge towards such a scheme is vastly documented elsewhere ([FDO's TheCaseForTheUsrMerge][0], [wiki.d.o UsrMerge][1]) but can be summarized as the following points: