On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:36:02PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> So, does anybody still see reasons to continue supporting a standalone
> /usr?
> If you do, please provide a detailed real-world use case.
> A partial list of invalid reasons is:
> - "it's really useful on my 386 SX with a 40 MB hard disk"
How about a 486 with a 96 MB Disk-on-Chip module? I maintain one such computer
(it's a PC104 form factor machine), as well as a number of AMD Geodes (586)
with 256 MB CompactFlash cards. It is very useful for these sytems to have a
minimal and functioning root filesystem, but to mount /usr over NFS.
Also, thin clients without harddisks may have a small SSD or get an initrd with
a root filesystem from TFTP, but again mount a shared, possible read-only /usr
over NFS.
I have an EeePC 901 with root and /home on the first 4 GB SSD, and /usr on the
second 16 GB SSD. The /usr is mounted read-only, and only remounted read-write
when apt is running. I have this setup because the first SSD is slightly faster
than the second, and the large /usr disk allows me to have a very large
fraction of Debian installed.
That said, the choice to put a program in /bin or /usr/bin is quite arbitrary.
It would be nice if one could tell dpkg where to install a package (and its
dependencies) to.
--
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org>
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