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Re: deprecating /usr as a standalone filesystem?



On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:41:06PM +0200, Stéphane Glondu wrote:
> Marco d'Itri a écrit :
> > I know that Debian supports this, but I also know that maintaning
> > forever large changes to packages for no real gain sucks.
> 
> > A partial list of invalid reasons is: [...]
> 
> How about: "my /usr is shared by many machines over NFS"?

That might have been a "traditional" reason for a shared /usr.
However, the package manager can't cope with this setup since
you have some components of a package installed locally and
some remotely for all systems using the "shared" part.  It's
an impossible situation to actually cater for in real life.
Has anyone ever actually *done* this?

Just having /usr on NFS doesn't make it shared if it's only
used by a single system, or unless you have a cluster using a common
image, but even then it's not shared between systems since they
are just clones of the same system--you wouldn't run dpkg on them.

As an aid to the maintainability and security of a system, it's
nice to be able to mount /usr readonly and also to run without it
using a minimal /usr for recovery and troubleshooting purposes.

Looking at GNU/Hurd, /usr is a symlink to /.  If we were to make
/usr non-separable, maybe this would be the way to go.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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