On 07/08/2012 03:43 AM, Andrew Benton wrote: > On Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:14:43 +0100 > Bruce Dubbs <bruce.du...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> The question was a bit more subtle. Is it OK to put things only needed >> for building in /lib? Historically, that location was only for the >> minimum needed to get critical programs running at boot time before /usr >> was mounted. > Huge disks are cheap now. The time when /usr needed to be on a separate > partition has long since passed (I've never seen a system where /usr > was a separate partition). I don't see the need for /usr at all now. > Why don't we install everything into /? It simplifies configuring many > packages as the don't need to be told --sysconfdir=/etc or > --localstatedir=/var. There are other reasons to have /usr on a separate partition, but I question how often they are actually used. A School computer lab is a prime example, but I'm seeing more and more OS X and OpenDirectory in that space. Just did a Lion migration last week in fact.
Unfortunately, we are at the point where /usr cannot be on a separate partition and still meet FHS-2.3 without an initrd (well, we could ditch udev and make BLFS a lot more difficult). Lots of changes coming though. With the loss of a few servers (in May IIRC), FHS-3.0 was put on hold. At this point, as much as I hate it, I can't suggest any way to handle it properly. We can suggest that users move forward with an initrd that can mount /usr but that still doesn't address the spec non-compliance at present. Thus far, FHS draft has done nothing to address the /usr debate as it can be _partially_ pushed off by providing an initrd that is capable of mounting /usr. RedHat is moving forward in F17 with the symlinked directories for /lib, /lib64, /bin, and /sbin, and Debian will continue to push forward with their sane approach to multi-lib instead of the abuse for binaries to the FHS spec that had been adopted by everyone but Debian (lib<qual> for primary arch). Who knows which way things are going at this point? There is going to have to be some give though, because the spec dependencies aren't quite compatible (POSIX->FHS->LSB). > The only downside is that for themes to work the > environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS=/share needs to be set. That could be fixed in the freedesktop source, or easier, symlink /share -> /usr/share just like /lib, /lib<qual>, /bin, and /sbin in the RedHat configuration. Do you mean to ditch the /usr directory completely? -- DJ Lucas -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content, and is believed to be clean. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
