Marc Haber <mh+debian-de...@zugschlus.de> writes: > On Sun, 03 Jan 2016 13:28:14 -0800, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> > wrote: >>But I don't get why people who are using non-embedded UNIX systems >>particularly care. > > I, for example, am afraid of having to merge /usr in existing systems > during upgrades, causing repartitions to be necessary. I am afraid of > partition layout suddenly not fitting any more during an upgrade, > causing downtimes and customers considering to take the opportunity to > migrate to a really supported enterprise distribution.
Are you afraid of your /usr partition being too small to hold the additional binaries from /bin, /sbin and /lib? If that is the case, won't it also be too small for regular distribution upgrades? Remember that / and /usr don't have to reside on the same partition with the usrmerge proposal: they only have to be both available post-initramfs. The initramfs already takes care to mount /usr (for the systemd case as initscripts needs updates for sysvinit as was said elsewhere). So no repartitioning should be required on upgrades. > And, I really don't want to have to adapt, test and verify scripts and > backup schemes to changed partition layout. This will be necessary for > new systems, and it is really a horror vision to have to do this for > existing systems during upgrades. I wouldn't expect much changes to be needed for backups: if you excluded /bin, /sbin, /lib and /usr, then it would be enough to just exclude /usr in the future. If you included them, they will still be included. Ansgar