Rich Freeman posted on Fri, 08 Apr 2016 06:36:48 -0400 as excerpted: > Really though the main point of merging these paths into /usr is to get > all the static content of a distro into a single path, which can then be > maintained as a read-only filesystem, mounted across multiple systems, > protected using tripwire or signature checking, and so on. As has been > pointed out the rolling release nature of Gentoo reduces some of these > benefits somewhat. To truly get these benefits we would also need to > rethink how post-install configuration gets managed as was already > pointed out.
Somewhat unrelated to the /usr or bin/sbin merge here, as (nearly) everything the package manager installs to any of its paths (including /usr, FWIW, but that's easy because my is a /usr -> . symlink) is on /, here, but FWIW, I actually do keep my / read-only mounted by default. So / is only mounted writable to update and/or change configuration. That includes /etc/ and of course my /usr -> . symlink, as well as parts of /var. The parts of /var that system services need to write into during normal operation (well, the ones that need to be permanent, those like /var/run that should be temporary are already on tmpfs mounts) are symlinked into subdirs under /home/var, with /home of course being mounted writable by default, so they can be written into during normal operation despite / being mounted read-only. Works out pretty well, actually, improving reliability of /, since it's normally mounted ro and thus is fully stable in the event of a system crash. Not having to worry about being unable to get to my system recovery tools on / in the event of a bad crash because / was mounted read-only and thus wasn't susceptible to the damage that writable-mounted filesystems can sustain in the event of a hard shutdown is nice. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
