On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 1:31 AM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote: > > On Mar 13, 2012 2:19 PM, "Alan McKinnon" <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:54:58 +0700 >> Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote: >> >> > > The idea of trying to launch udevd and initialize devices without >> > > the software, installed in /usr, which is required by those devices >> > > is a configuration that causes problems in many real-world, >> > > practical situations. >> > > >> > > The requirement of having /usr on the same partition as / is also a >> > > configuration that causes problems in many real-world, practical >> > > situations. >> > > >> > >> > I quite often read about this, and after some thinking, I have to >> > ask: why? >> > >> >> I've also thought about this and I also want to ask why? >> >> I stopped using a separate /usr on my workstations a long time ago when >> I realized it was pointless. The days of 5M hard disks when the entire >> OS didn't fit on one are long gone. The days of my software going tits >> up at the drop of a hat requiring a minimal repair environment to fix >> it at boot are also long gone (my desk is littered with LiveCDs and >> bootable flash drives). >> >> So I can't find a single good reason why /usr *must* be separate and my >> workstations are the only machines that will ever have hotplug booting >> issues. >> >> I'm even considering changing the install standards for the company >> servers to dispense with separate /usr, as long as there are safeguards >> against clowns who don't read INSTALL files and happily >> accept /usr/local/<package>/var as a storage area. >> > > I just did some more thinking, and *maybe* the reason is to prevent > something under /usr (src and share comes to mind) from growing too big and > messes up the root filesystem. > > Place the offenders on a separate partition, then mount them under /usr, and > all should be well...
The always used example is to have /usr shared as a read only NFS partition among several workstations. In corporate environments it is certainly used this way (or at least it was when I worked, and the way I used it in my office seven or eight years ago). Of course, for a normal desktop user, a separate /usr is basically useless. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
