On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Kent Fredric <kentfred...@gmail.com> wrote: > Given that these tools are being moved to /usr and/or duplicated to in > initrd , what is the point of a root filesystem anyway now? Just to > mount other things on? Just to store /etc ? > > Or will /etc move to /usr too?
I'd recommend reading the fedora docs. Their plan is to make /usr read-only so that it contains all elements of the system managed by the distro. In the future rpm world config files exist half on /usr, with overriding content in /etc (they don't have etc-update, and etc-update isn't always perfect either). But yes, the trend is towards making rootfs a bit more "virtual." I can see some of the benefits of this arrangement, but by the time we get that all worked out btrfs might be practical, and its subvolumes actually solve many of the problems that lvm and many partitions are used to solve today. With btrfs you can make /usr a subvolume and snapshot it at will, or set up a quota just for it. That doesn't cover all the use cases, but it does cover most of the desktop-y ones. As far as repairing the system from rootfs goes - I think that greatly depends on your circumstances. If everything is on root anyway then it is a moot point. If everything isn't on root then your ability to recover is inversely proportional to the complexity of your systems. As others have pointed out, there is always something that you won't have, and to be honest it isn't all that hard to just boot a liveDVD that has everything and the kitchen sink available anyway. Rich
