I'm wondering how other people feel about forward symlinks: are they safe?  Good practice?  Depends?  The reason I ask is that apparently in the linux desktop world, there seems to be a push by various distros to combine /usr/bin with /bin.  I've asked why but haven't gotten any great answers other than being able to do an exec call to load programs and not have to search PATH (which, to me, seems a rather inconsequential thing to do). So they don't want to search path and always use /usr/bin/ -- ok, why not just put symlinks in /usr/bin pointing back to /bin?   (FWIW, it's not just bin, but also sbin, lib and lib64).  Instead of using backlinks, my current current distro has chosen to move binaries off of the root partition onto/into /usr and, as they move files from /[s]bin and the libs to /usr/[s]bin, they are putting forward-links from the root-based dirs to the files in /usr.I have gotten no reasons, at all, for why they decided to move things from the root partition to /usr, but I thought it was common sense, in the case of critical files (like those needed for boot), to never use links to a file-system that mightnot be mounted by the time you can reference the symlinks.I.e. links in /usr to root are safe because you can't mount /usr if you don't have a root!  But the other way around... moer than once I've restored /usr from backup or hand-fixed some problem solely from the rootfs.Am I being overly conservative or are forward link now considered to be in the realm of 'good practice' for critical files??
forward vs. backward symlinks: administrative practice?
compatibility