Michael Stone wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 06:54:07AM -0800, Robert W. Current wrote: > > Linux was once fairly complete at 10M, now it's easily 500M in /usr, and > > nothing in /usr/local or /opt. That's starting to get rediculus. The OS > > is not 500M... That's the issue. So, why is there 500+M of crap in > > /usr/bin? > > Why would it be better to have 500M in /opt? That's the sticking point. > You're saying that you don't want a standard that allows distributions > to put things in /usr, and I'm saying that there are distributions that > want to do things that way. Can you offer a reasoned argument to support > why your way is right and the other way is wrong?
In a networked environment it would be better for a lot of the packages currently in /usr to be installed in /opt. Why? Because, if a distribution installation is allowed to overwrite /usr then /usr shouldn't be networked. Or from the other angle, if you want (after an installation) to mount /usr, then its a waste of time and local disk resources to have the installation install in a local /usr. See NOTE 1. To save disk space many things can be shared, as /usr/local should be local to a machine, /opt is the natural place for such sharing to occur. Personally I think it would be good that if you accidentely destoryed your root partition, you didn't have to overwrite 500+MB of perfectly fine /usr during a reinstall. :) NOTE 1: That said, if you want to mount /usr you might want a subset of /usr on your local machine for redundancy, so that if your network falls over you can still get a system running.
