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Re: deprecating /usr as a standalone filesystem?



On Tue, May 05 2009, Marco d'Itri wrote:

> I have been told by upstream maintainers of one of my packages and by
> prominent developers of other distributions that supporting a standalone
> /usr is too much work and no other distribution worth mentioning does it
> (not Ubuntu, not Fedora, not SuSE).
>
> I know that Debian supports this, but I also know that maintaning
> forever large changes to packages for no real gain sucks.
>
> So, does anybody still see reasons to continue supporting a standalone
> /usr?

- Security.
  + One may want to have /usr mounted read only
  + Other file systems can have different mount options. not possible
    if they needed to have /usr
- Backups: having different partitions allows one to have different
  backup policies
- corruption: easier to recover from corruption when paritions are
  smaller and targeted.
- encryption: you might not want to encrypt the whole disk.


,----[ /etc/fstab snippet ]
| LABEL=1 /           ext3  noatime,errors=remount-ro   0 1
| LABEL=2 /boot       ext3  noatime,defaults,rw,noauto  0 2
| LABEL=3 /usr        ext3  noatime,defaults,ro         0 2
| LABEL=4 /home       ext3  noatime,rw,nodev            0 2
| LABEL=5 /usr/local  ext3  noatime,rw,nosuid,nodev     0 2
| LABEL=6 /var        ext3  noatime,rw,nosuid           0 2
| LABEL=7 /var/spool  ext3  noatime,rw,nosuid,nodev     0 2
| LABEL=8 /backup     ext3  noatime,rw,nosuid,nodev     0 2
| LABEL=9 /scratch    ext3  noatime,rw                  0 2
`----

        manoj

-- 
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C


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