On 30/09/2013 12:27, Daniel Campbell wrote: > On 09/30/2013 04:31 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> On 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote: >> >> >>> Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate >>> /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat >>> interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I >>> imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the >>> files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended >>> instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's >>> not adjacent to /'s partition? >> >> >> Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice. >> In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any >> changes to partitions you know you will need. >> >> Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient >> Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient >> >> copy the latter over to the former >> edit fstab >> reboot >> >> It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but >> because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd >> environment. >> >> There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result >> blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system >> knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their >> config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the >> user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do. >> >> >>> >>> I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple >>> system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home. >>> >> > My suspicions were mostly correct, then. If the merge is that simple, I > see no reason not to do it if one doesn't want to roll an initramfs. > However, I imagine moving partitions around in gparted or something > similar would be quite a wait if / and /usr weren't adjacent on the drive.
Indeed, this is the part where it can get hairy, and it all totally depends on how the user decided to lay out their partitions. Eyeballs and brains form the solution here, not computers and scripts :-) > > Thanks for the simple-but-thorough explanation. :) > -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
