Re: partitioning for dual-linux..
On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 10:11:43AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 09:29:51AM +0100, Digby Tarvin wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 07:15:35PM +1000, Arafangion wrote:
> > > Digby Tarvin wrote:
> > >
> > <snip>
> > > >This is my initial though on the partitioning of the 60GB drive on my
<snip>
>
> I've pondered this issue a bit. what about this idea, slightly OT to
> your original post but ...
>
> place a /home in each root partition (one for each distro) and then
> within that home have a mount point for all your "stuff" within ~.
> The idea being that each distro could write all its various and
> possibly conflicting ~/.<random config file> in the ~ located in
> the root partition, but place all the "neutral" stuff like documents,
> project, photos whatever into the other partition with links to it
> all.
>
> for example:
>
> in /etc/fstab of each distro:
>
> /dev/hd12 /home/me/my_stuff ext3 etc...
>
> then in each / of each distro:
>
> mkdir /home/me
> mkdir /home/me/my_stuff
>
> this way, with two sets of /home/me the crucially incompatible stuff
> stays hidden from the other distro.
>
> lots of noise for a simple idea.
Yes, that is something that I hand't really addressed in the layout I
described.
I was rather hoping that Debian and Ubuntu would be similar enough to
share the home directory unmodified, and upgrading from one version of
Debian to another would also not effect the home partition.
But I do have a desktop system on which I have installed Gentoo and
SuSE, and have used a strategy similar to what you have described.
Except the /home on the root partition is a symlink to a directory
in /var so that users don't get write permission in root.
An alternative, perhaps cleaner, approach would be to have the system
dependencies in a /var/home, with a shared home directories union
mounted over the top to avoid the need for the extra directory level.
Ultimately I think the whole '$HOME/.xxxx' paradigm for configuration
files is over used and has exceeded its usefulness. It was fine when
there were just one or two such files, but now there are hundreds.
If I remember correctly, when the guys at Bell labs went on to design
the successor to Unix (Plan9), they did away with using the '.' hidden
files, and instead just use a $user/lib directory to hold all configuration
files, such as $user/lib/profile, which I think is a bit tidier, and it
would then be easy to, for instance, make a sym link to a per user
directory in /var.
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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