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Ok, so the day has come. On the context of getting "/usr merge" on alpine, I am going to try update the FHS.
9 years after it was updated, big parts of it are out-of-sync with the current Linux distro conventions.
We (@postmarketOS) already pinged the @linuxfoundation about it in February, and their suggestion was to get somebody interested to do the work. So let's start that process now! Since the FHS mailing list seems defunc (I subscribed and sent an email in February that never got added to the archive), please send me an email at pabloyoyoista@postmarketos.org so we can get a list of people to start discussing the process
The fact that a small, young distro like postmarketOS is trying to do this work seems a bit odd. I would have expected others with a lot more experience and leverage in the community to have jumped on updating it when they made the "/usr merge" compulsory. But since that didn't happen, we'll do our best.
The worst possible outcome is we spend some time, are unsuccessful getting enough traction to get the standard updated, and then we collectively agree the standard does not reflect reality and is dead. Let's hope we don't get there.
@pabloyoyoista Maybe you can also find a few contributers via https://uapi-group.org/
@gromit Thanks! Yes, we will contact key people from it
@pabloyoyoista I think the best way to go about is to post in the discussions there 
@pabloyoyoista my take on it as a fellow distro maintainer is that we're all stretched so thin with trying to put out fires and deal with both unhappy users and unhappy upstreams that nobody has really had the energy to try to update it.
@vimproved that's a shame. But that's where collaboration should help, I guess?
@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation Good luck! This work will be very valuable - I love consistent standards and I'm sure it will also fix many incompatibilities in the progress.
@pabloyoyoista this feels like a nerdsnipe. I'd be curious.
@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation I do not have time to participate in detail but I have a request to make with my Autoconf upstream maintaner hat on:
In the revised standard, please make a hard requirement (MUST, in the sense of RFC 2119) for executable shell scripts to continue using `#! /bin/sh` and not `#! /usr/bin/sh` as their first line, and for executable scripts that use the `env` hack to use `#! /usr/bin/env` and not `#! /bin/env`. Please also make a requirement for conforming programs to look up *all other* executables via $PATH instead of under any particular absolute path, to the maximum extent possible.
These are vital for continued cross-compatibility with the BSD phylum; last I checked there was no intention of ever going to a "merged /usr" layout on that side of the fence.
@zwol @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation thanks for the thoughts! If you really care about something, please follow along the process and propose requests once there's a place for it. I'm afraid I'll completely loose track of mastodon comments 
@pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @linuxfoundation understood, email sent