[fhs-discuss] static sharable files

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Karl Goetz 

| > Another option is to deprecate or disallow /usr not being on the root
| > file system.
| 
| While I'd be in favour of saying it should/must be available, i dont
| know if i'd agree we should require it to be on the / partition. ( I
| should probably do some more research on that).

The alternative is to move a significant chunk of what's in /usr to /
for services to work correctly.  How big this chunk is, I don't know.

| > Separate /usr made sense back when drives were small and disk space
| > was expensive, but in the vast majority of cases today, having /usr
| > on the root file system is no real burden.  Not having it on the root
| > file system means more brittle setups and trying to share /usr between
| > installations can easily lead to maintenance headaches.
| 
| Anyone on the list who does embedded stuff who can comment?
| On my desktop, 4.5gb of the 4.7GB used on / (/var/ and /tmp are
| separate) is /usr. How does this ratio compare on embedded systems?

Out of the ~295M used on / on my Nokia N900, ~233 MB is /usr.

| > Separate /usr makes sense is in the embedded case where you are
| > seriously space-restricted and you might want have your OS on fast
| > flash and the apps and user data on cheaper, but slower flash.  In
| > those cases, I'd suggest putting apps in /opt rather than the more
| > common /usr.
| 
| for a repackaging vendor i can imagine /opt/ being the right place, but
| using /opt for OS components seems slightly bizarre to me (perhaps I'm
| just too used to the current fhs!).

Well, if you have something like the N900, you'll have the
vendor-provided OS that includes X and whatever libraries that is part
of the standard stack.  In addition, you have various apps and addons
that install to /opt.  Those are not created by Nokia, but by
third-party vendors.  (Nokia does distribute them through their
application installer, though.)  I think using /opt in that case makes
perfect sense.

Regards,
-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are