On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 06:32:37PM -0600, Nathan E Norman wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 11:41:12PM -0800, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> > On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 21:27:21 -0600, you wrote:
> >
> > >>
> > >> Hmm, yes I can move those directories and replace them with links or
> > >> just mount them to appropriate dirs under /usr. Did not think of that.
> > >> But still, apt has this little flaw it seems to me.
> > >
> > >apt is flawed because your /usr/partition is too small and you did not
> > >think to use symlinks? That's hilarious.
> >
> > Apt is flawed because allowance is not made for the fact that hard drives
> > fill up.
> >
> > I can use symlinks, I can copy /usr to a new hd and mount the new hd as
> > /usr. But these things could be unnecessary if a small amount of lee way
> > were built into the system.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> I must be completely missing your point.
>
> [ rant snipped ]
>
> What _would satisfy you? A system that said "Hi, I noticed your /usr
> is pretty full so I'm going to delete some stuff"? Or should it say
> "Hi, /usr is full so I'll just install stuff into
> /{home,var,opt,mnt,whatever}" even though that's totally against
> accepted standards, will make life for users of this machine
> difficult, and will be almost impossible to maintain? IOW, your
> "small amount of leeway" (it's one word) is no small thing at all.
There may actually be a valid idea in this; If we allow dpkg to install
files in different places than the package says, and puts symlinks in
place, then it just might work. E.g. if the package wants
/usr/bin/foobar, then dpkg could be put in /mntpoint/bin/foobar and add
a symlink to /usr/bin.
Something like:
dpkg --substitute /usr:/mntpoint --install my-favourite.deb
(some packages may not like having their files becoming symlinks)
> You say (in another email) that you are a programmer and you think
> this should be an obvious solution. Fine, fire up $EDITOR and code
> away, submit patches, start your own distro, whatever. If that's
> beyond you, try to understand _why_ things work the way they do. Read
> the FHS. Read "Essential UNIX Administration" (Frisch). As a system
> administrator I would be appalled by a system that works the way you
> seem to want it to work. As a programmer I see nothing but a
> minefield for little to no gain in usability.
I have to agree here. I would not want to fiddle with location of the
files. Although it is probably possible to symlink things into /usr, I
don't see the need to. Perhaps it will be useful for very odd systems,
e.g. multiple 100Mb disks !? (LVM sounds better).
Noah:- if you're really interested, feel free to hack dpkg. I have to
admit that I would not want to use such a feature, but somebody else
might. As long as it doesn't break dpkg and the default behaviour
doesn't change, I guess it would be OK. Just because *I* don't like the
idea, doesn't make it wrong.
--
Karl E. Jørgensen
karl@jorgensen.com
www.karl.jorgensen.com
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