Re: /etc getting bigger

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 04:37:56PM +0300, Eray Ozkural wrote:

> As my root partition is filling up, I wonder why sysconfdir has to be /etc
> and not /usr/etc for programs where prefix is /usr. Wouldn't that be more
> compliant with GNU build conventions? Just out of curiosity.

/usr/etc, unless it is a symlink elsewhere (in which case the use of the
symlink destination directly would make more sense), would be part of a
read-only filesystem on many systems.  Quoth the FHS:

       4.  The /usr Hierarchy

       /usr is the second major section of the filesystem.  /usr is shareable,
       read-only data.  That means that /usr should be shareable between
       various hosts running FHS-compliant and should not be written to.  Any
       information that is host-specific or varies with time is stored
       elsewhere.

Configuration files are generally host-specific and vary with time.

-- 
 - mdz