Re: Should /usr be merged with /? (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Anyone switched to eudev yet?)

[Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk>]

> The latest FHS dates from 2004, the same year as the *earliest* FUSE release I 
> can see on the FUSE web site.  I'd say a good working hypothesis is that FHS 
> was simply written *before* any user-space file systems were more than an 
> experimental oddity.
> 
> 
> > IF the system's /home directory is formatted as an OpenBSD partition,
> > then yes, FHS demands that tools for mounting and recovering it be in
> > /.  
> 
> 
> I'd certainly be happy "fixing" FHS to say that tools for mounting and 
> recovering "essential system partitions" be located in /, and that these 
> "essential system partitions" contain the tools for mounting and recovering 
> non-essential partitions.
> 

Which would include testdisk (As far as I know the only linux tool able
to read an OpenBSD partition) in /usr. Of course the admin is
free to move a copy of testdisk to /. No-one is saying the FHS is
perfect, I know the BSD crowd would say far from it but we want it to
move in the right not wrong direction.

> If you are wondering where I stand, I currently boot with an initramfs, since 
> I have everything except /boot located on LVM devices. This includes / and a 
> seperate /usr, done mostly from habit after 15 years of habit, and working 
> where that was the corporate standard production practice.
> 
> As to system recovery, nowdays I ususlly do that by booting from a live CD/DVD 
> so I have access to all the tools when I need them. Which reminds me that I 
> need to update my rescue DVD to the latest version...

A rescue CD has the benefit of being on read only media and perhaps
including tools and perhaps enabling permissions you don't want on the
system or auditing without running anything from the system and as a
fallback but in general single user is more appropriate than both cd and
ramdisk and atleast is useful as it can be tailored to the system, is
the system and is more likely familiar to the user, a system may not
have a cd and maybe not usbs or be remote and as shown is less likely
to be upto date and so secure and so useful online, especially if you
need a host to upload the cd image.

Note: This should highlight how wrong Gregs freedesktop.org links are.

-- 
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'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
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