On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 04:32:46PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove > > I am still not 100% persuaded that this would be easy to do, but at > least I think that it has more merit than the old "move all to /"... > > How much complex would it be to implement this in Debian? I have a better question: what would it buy us? "Provide a simple way of mounting almost the entire system read-only and share it between multiple hosts to save maintenance and space," is what that wiki page says, but I'm not convinced. In theory, you can already share /usr between multiple systems today; but nobody does it, because - Keeping your software on a central fileserver introduces a single point of failure that you don't have if you don't do the central fileserver thing - Moving more off / and into /usr does not free you of the need to synchronize stuff across your systems (you have less to synchronize if you only need to do /etc, but that's actually the hardest part to synchronize) - Frankly, in today's world, the amount of storage you need for your software often pales in comparison to the amount of storage you need for your data. I've rarely had to maintain a network of more than just a few systems that had more than 10G worth of software locally installed. When was the last time you bought a 10G hard disk? If you're still having / be on local disk, you're still going to need a local hard disk. Let's say you can still find a 146G SAS disk somewhere -- that leaves you with 136G of wasted space anyway. There are two ways of running a network of similar or identical computers: either you use a configuration management system such as puppet or chef or whatnot and make sure they are all kept in sync (which is a bit of a fiddly set-up, but works very well for some things), or you run them all diskless, and boot them off the same image on the network (which is also a bit of a fiddly set-up, but works very well for a different set of things). This proposition requires one to do /both/ of those fiddly set-ups, for no additional benefit. I think it's a bad idea. -- The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by the following formula: pi zz a
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