Re: sharing /var/cache between two installations of debian?

[Andrew Schulman <andrex@alumni.utexas.net>]

> I want to both to use the same /var/cache partition.  /var/cache has its own 
> partition.  I already share /tmp and swap.  Is there anything in /var/cache, 
> or is there anything that could be in /var/cache that would cause problems if 
> it was shared in this way?

I don't know, but there are other things you can do short of sharing all 
of /var/cache.  For example, you could mount just part of it in both 
Debs, e.g. /var/cache/apt/archives, which takes up about 1 GB on my 
host.  That would be a pretty big space savings for you already.

If you don't want to separately mount a whole bunch of subdirectories in 
/var/cache, then you could mount the partition that holds /var/cache at, 
say, /mnt/cache in each Deb, and then set up a bunch of symlinks in each 
Deb's /var/cache, pointing into the shareable parts of /mnt/cache.

This doesn't answer the question of which parts of /var/cache are safely 
shareable, but it does give you a strategy for sharing just the parts 
that you know (or think) are safe.

Good luck,
Andrew.