[$] Unexpected fallout from /usr merge in Debian

Back in 2011, Harald Hoyer and Kay Sievers came up with a proposal forFedorato merge much of the operating system into /usr; former top-leveldirectories, /bin, /lib, and /sbin, would then become symbolic links pointing into thecorresponding subdirectories of /usr.Left out of the merge would be things likeconfiguration files in /etc, data in/var, and user home directories. This change was aimed atfeatures like atomic upgrades and easy snapshots. The switchto a merged /usr was successful for Fedora 17; many otherdistributions (Arch,OpenSUSE, Mageia,just to name a few) have followed suit. More recently, Debian has beenworking toward a merged /usr, but it ran into some surprisingproblems that are unique to the distribution.