Omer Zak <w...@zak.co.il> writes: > My current Linux system has a 15GB root partition, which has 6GB files. > Turns out that that about 5.5GB are in the /opt directory. > My /usr partition is 206GB, of which about 33GB are used. > > This led me to wonder why is it not recommended in the FSSTND[1] to > deprecate /opt[2] and install its contents as /usr/opt (possibly with > soft link from /opt to /usr/opt).
It's not about the name (or mount point), it's about whether /opt is a separate partition. Note that /opt is intended for software (and data) that is not a part of the system/distro, is installed in a non-standard way, etc. This is something you may want to keep intact, e.g., when you upgrade the base system. So you should keep /opt (and /home, for that matter) on a separate partition from root (that normally includes /usr) and allow clobbering the latter (upgrading, reinstalling, etc) without touching /opt. You could mount an add-on partition as /usr/opt, of course, but what would be the point in the context of your question? It is actually more logical to have /opt than /usr/opt. It is not clear to me what your partition scheme is. On the one hand, you say that /opt is a part of /, on the other hand, it sounds like you mounted /usr sepaately, not as a part of /. It is possible, of course, though not very frequent - I'd say the opposite is more common. This last observation is relevant to Ari's response to your post. The whole point of, say, /sbin is to have the basic system utilities necessary for booting the system separate from /usr, and only when everything is fine and /usr is mounted /usr/sbin and /usr/bin become available. Nowadays /usr is seldom mounted separately, and the direction is to disallow it completely (and, if I understand correctly, to require /usr inside initramfs, I'll admit that I don't completely understand the reasons)). This would obviate /bin and /sbin. However, /bin and /sbin are a part of the base system, just like /usr. The case of /opt and /home is different. > [1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il