/usr/etc
Hi all,
About a year ago, there was a discussion about /usr/etc.
It seems (to me, at least) that it stopped without final
decisions for or against. Since I am interested in this
subject (for practical purpuses - I manage a few 10's of
Linux workstations which I intend to convert to debian
with a shared /usr), I would like to know whether a decision
was made (which I was unable to find in the archive), and
if not, why was the discussion stopped (perhaps because
the interested participants found other solutions to /usr
sharing).
Just my 2 cents - nothing new, others have said this:
I think most of the configuration files in a typical
workstations site (and I specifically say workstations -
things are different with simple XTerminals or with
compute clusters) can be shared. I also think it could
be nice if the sharing or unsharing of a particular file
could be decided by the administrator (at install time
of a package, or even as a system policy?).
Other solutions have arrived, such as cluster-nfs
(look at cluster-nfs at sourceforge - basically it's
an NFS server that lets some (few?) files to be different
for different client machines/users).
Still, I think one of the oldest ideas on which the whole
Un*x filesystem hierarchy is based is that of sharing /usr,
and it's a waste that this can't practically be done, with
any of the Linux distributions I know.
I looked at some of debian's mailing-lists archives,
including policy, and found nothing, except the above-
mentioned discussion. BTW, I couldn't find archives for
the FHS mailing list (to which I am not subscribed (yet?)).
I would like to hear what people think, and whether there
is a chance to reintroduce /usr/etc to debian (and fhs).
TIA,
didi
Reply to: