Re: [gentoo-user] Pending layman directory "relocation"

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 03 March 2010 18:33:52 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Alan McKinnon writes:
> > On Wednesday 03 March 2010 14:21:23 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> > > That's right, they should both be in /var.
> > 
> > I concur. /usr has a long tradition is Unix of often being mounted
> > read-only (think thin clients that mount it over NFS).
> 
> Any idea why it's different with Gentoo in the first place? /usr also
> always sounded wrong to me for the portage tree.
> And for other things. Shouldn't /usr/src go somewhere into /var? And
> shouldn't /usr/share/config stuff be in /etc?

/usr/src/ is the traditional place for kernel header files. They are intended 
to be static, change seldom, and definitely not something that users can 
change. Normally, root would update them when needed, and stuff can then build 
against them.

/usr/share/config/ is an upstream thing and if you follow FHS then /etc/ is a 
better place. But Gentoo follows upstream as much as possible so this one gets 
left as-is.

NB: Gentoo only follows FHS when it suits Gentoo devs to do it :-) The 
reasoning offered is usually that Gentoo is a source distro and therefore has 
little needs of FHS, which does tend towards compatibility between binary 
distros

> 
> > My set up is:
> > 
> > portage:	/var/portage/
> > my overlay:	/var/portage/local/alan/
> > layman:		/var/portage/local/layman/*
> > 
> > As portage is hard-coded to not fiddle with $PORTDIR/local/, this works
> > well for me and every ebuild on the system is under one mount point.
> 
> Where do you have the distfiles? I now have it like this:

/var/distfiles/
/var/packages/
/var/rpm/

I do it this way as I am confident portage will leave /var/portage/local/ 
alone, I have no confidence it will do the same for the above three. Plus, 
those dirs can get big, and I keep the portage volume small and tight for 
performance reasons

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com